and it runs through my veins
by hotpielookedlikehotpie
Summary: AU, part 1 of 3. There's a saying in the Districts of Panem, that every time a child is born, the mother cries louder than the baby.
1. Chapter 1

Author: hotpielookedlikehotpie  
Fandom: The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins  
Story Title: and it runs through my veins  
Series Title: and it runs through my veins  
Summary: _No one else volunteered. Effie scooted her off the stage alone, as the mayor read about official Capitol business. The history of Panem and the land that used to be called North America. How disease and death spread through and how there seemed to be no end. How the Dark Days almost killed everyone off. How the Capitol rose out of the rubble and plagues and became strong and fit. How the Districts were built to house the unworthy to do work for the Capitol, and when time came, to be reaped. Katniss barely listened to the speech, she never really did. She ran her finger over different parts of her body, wondering what they would be taking from her._  
Characters: Katniss, Peeta, Gale, Haymitch, Effie, Primrose, Madge, Finnick, Annie, Rue, Seneca Crane, President Snow, Mrs. Everdeen,  
Rating: M  
Warnings: (as of right now most of these are light but as this goes on it'll develop as well) language; violence; mental illness; sexual themes; character death; physical/emotional abuse; forced sexual slaved/references to prostitution, etc  
Disclaimer: All settings and proprietary language are owned by the author of the work from which this is derived.  
Notes: AU; I got the idea after a night of watching Never Let Me Go. Started out as a quick thought of Katniss and Peeta, and then evolved into a lot more. There are going to be three parts to this, all posted in a chunk as well like this one. The second will pick up right where this one lets off. Don't expect it any time soon though, just this part took me a bit over a month (along with planning out, and writing some parts even for future parts). I've posted on my tumblr different parts of this story, under the tag "and+it+runs+through+my+veins", and my url is the same as it is here. Alright. Enjoy.

* * *

_The world breaks us all. Afterward, some are stronger at the broken places. – Ernest Hemingway_

* * *

There's a saying in the Districts of Panem, that every time a child is born, the mother cries louder than the baby.

Her husband gave her a bouquet of flowers as their first child was born, and she cried into them until they were crushed. He told himself that bringing her flowers wasn't the best idea, but still did the same thing come their second born (Primroses, he brought her primroses then). And both times, it held true. She cried louder than her newborns. What did newborns have to cry about, anyway? There was a change of environment for them to be sure, as well as the first time functioning for themselves. The mother had much more to cry for. This would be the only time that the mother's child would experience a new place (_hopefully_, they always thought, clinging even closer to the child as they held it for the first time. _Hopefully_). The mother's child would live a drab life. There wasn't a fear of 'what if I cannot provide for the mother's child,' but a distinct knowledge that they never would be able to. It was a cruel, mad world that the mother's child was brought into, and the mother wept louder than the child's cries for inflicting that upon a soul that they already loved. It wasn't fair, but that was life. Everyone had to have children, the Capitol reminded them. Everyone needed to provide.

Everything always seemed to come down to the Capitol.

* * *

She held her little girl's hand tightly as they walked down the street. The little girl laughed and try to flit away from the restraints, her dark hair in braids, her grey eyes dancing across the day. Her mother got distracted by someone her age, and the little girl named Katniss found herself able to slip from her hand and be free.

She found her way to the meadow and sang as she made herself a crown of flowers. Her mother screamed when she realized that her little girl got away, when her little bird flew. She found her soon enough, and Katniss smiled at her mother's teared face and held out another flower crown, just the right size for her mother.

Her mother bent down and let her little girl place it on her head, and brought her in close for a hug. "Don't do that again." She held her little daughter, a spitting image of her father, down to the rebellious bone that was already poking through. "Don't leave me, Katniss. Not again. You gave me quite a scare, please don't do that to me again," Her hand went to her stomach. "There's another Everdeen coming on the way," She whispered to her daughter. Katniss smiled wide and laughed at the prospect of another person that she could love. "Katniss, you'll be a big sister. You have to take care of her. Or him. Whoever joins us, you have to realize that me and dad will always be there, but you have to too."

Little Katniss tried to look serious and nod, but ended up giggling. Her mother smiled and took her into her arms again. "My little bird," She cooed, and Katniss chirped and laughed like she always did when her mother called her a bird. "You keep your song bright."

She took her little girl's hand again, and didn't let go. She didn't wipe the tears, and they ended going home with no groceries that they set out to buy.

* * *

The day her little sister was born, Katniss wasn't allowed to be around. But she saw the flowers his father had for her mother before the door closed and the screams started. So she went to the meadow. She gathered all the flowers she could that resembled the ones her father had. Katniss arrived back at her house with a handful of primroses and her mother had her little sister in her arms. Katniss put the flowers in a vase, all except for one, and walked up to her mother, father, and new sister. Her name was Primrose, and Katniss laughed as both her and her mother clutched at the primrose.

"Prim," Katniss said, since it was easier to say than the whole word. Katniss laid her flower by her new sister, and baby Primrose grabbed at her finger.

Her mother cried harder.

* * *

You're too young to remember your own firsts of your life, but Katniss made sure to remember everything she could of her little sister. When she grew older, her first memory was of Prim's first steps. And she'd help the toddler waddle through the house, until pretty soon it became a chasing game. Their shrieks and laughter danced throughout the tiny house, and husband and wife watched the two of them with small smiles on their faces. Katniss smiled at them and stopped for a bit to look at them, until Primrose giggled and almost caught her. Katniss cawed, and took off again. Her father took her mother in his arms, and they continued to watch.

And her mother smiled. Really smiled, a thing she never expected herself to be able to do. But within these three people, her family, she found her reason. She couldn't remember the last time she thought of the Capitol, or how much money they didn't have. Because really, what did it matter when she was surrounded by so much love? Her own mother told her on the night she left her house to be with her husband that love was mortal, and had a survival rate lower than a starving little girl stuck in the Seam. She promised to prove her mother wrong. And every day she did.

Every day until the mine collapsed, at least.

* * *

The three of them stood by the edges of the mine along with the rest of the crowd, watching miner after miner come up from the smoke and rubble. _The next is going to be father_, Katniss thought to herself with each emerging silhouette, and gripped her sister's hand harder and harder when it wasn't. The night grew darker, the people around them lessened, and they continued to wait. Her mother was standing there and not holding them, or talking. It was as if she already went away.

Eventually, a Peacekeeper came over to them. _I'm sorry,_ he said to them,_ but that's all of the survivors. If you'd walk over here please and give us your name, your information, and we'll figure everything out._

Her mother didn't move. She didn't cry or shout or hit or do a damn thing. _Move, woman_, Katniss pleaded in her head. She was eleven years old and felt older than the woman who birthed her. And so Katniss untangled her fingers from her sister, wiped her own tears, and marched over to the Peacekeepers.

That was the day of Death. Her father died, but that wasn't all. Her mother died as well basically, became a shell of a being. Living without living. Primrose lost her parents. Katniss lost her childhood, her smiles, and her voice. The day was black with mine soot, and Katniss couldn't shake it off of her, but just kept her eyes opened and wide against the burn of it all.

Late at night, when she held Prim and let her cry into her chest, and heard her mom lay down and let her tears fall, Katniss just felt old and tired. There were too many people to talk to, too many condolences. She was too young for it all, and suddenly people were talking to her of the Capitol and Reapings. She was still too young, wasn't she? No, not anymore. She was old, so old. She felt withered and wrinkly even, and had to bring her hands up to her face to feel the smooth surface. And there, at eleven years old, she decided she'd never care for another person again.

* * *

Someone tried to make their way into her life though. They always did that, didn't they? It was a boy at school, a kid from the good part of town. His name was Peeta Mellark. And although Katniss never had an overabundance of friends or just even people who willingly would sit and talk to her, he was one of them.

After the accident, Katniss distanced herself from them all with a wall that seemed to grow overnight made of ice and fire at once, a wall that separated all the normal eleven year olds from eleven year old Katniss who had a family to support. She distanced herself, and people let her. Everyone let her slink away. For the most part.

He didn't.

They'd sometimes sit together at lunch. It started when they were younger. He tripped and fell in front of her one day outside during lunch where she sat in a patch of dandelions, and laid there for a while. So she laughed and poked his side once and he didn't react. And so she poked harder, and harder, until she full on had both hands on his side and tickled him. Their laughter entwined together, shaping in and out within each other. He had lunch with her that day, and a couple of other days throughout the week. Sometimes they'd play tag together.

As they grew older, they were taunted because he was a Merchant's son that hung around with some stupid trash of a Seam Girl. It didn't matter to him, but the words stung her deep. She sometimes hid from him during lunch because of this, and their five year old playing days became nine year old quiet lunches on occasion.

The day after Katniss grew up overnight, he sat down next to her for lunch.

* * *

When he sat nearby, she got up and sat somewhere else alone. She didn't raise her face to him, couldn't, as if he was like that stupid cat Buttercup and would come over once she acknowledged his presence. She watched him out of the corner of her eye though, to see what he'd do. And he stared at her and shook his head, and soon got up and sat next to her again. She sat still for a moment and looked at the apple in her hand that she got from her neighbor's tree this morning. She considered moving again, and he read her mind. "You keep running off and I'll keep following."

She stayed silent. Madge still, over the years after Katniss grew up at the age of eleven, would sit next to her in lunch and classes. But she understood, and she didn't talk. This Peeta Mellark, this boy who barely talked to her but would just sometimes sit next to her, seemed determined to make her speak.

And she did not like that.

"Why?" She asked him, going into her bag and picking up whatever ended up in her hand and biting angrily into her food. What was it even? Something that will help her survive. Her and Prim. Her mind thought to her mother back home, still in bed, and wondered if she'd get up.

"Because the last thing you need right now is to be alone."

Katniss whipped her face around to see him. She took in the look on his face, and felt a bit confused. She expected to find it drenched in pity, like every other goddamn face that she's seen since the Peacekeepers asked for her family's information and how to spell her fathers name for a plaque. Peeta looked sad, but it didn't seem like there was pity. Everyone around her in the school, whenever they looked at her, their faces screamed how bad they felt for her sadness, but Peeta seemed to feel the sadness, not just acknowledge it. "I'm not alone. I have Prim." _Not mother, not father, no longer. But I have Prim._

"You need your friends, Katniss." His voice was soft, and she almost could feel herself fall into it. How easy that could be, to just accept that she needed her classmates. Maybe next they'd start to give her food and clothes and then soon enough they'll take her and her sister to the Homes.

"You're not my goddamn friend." _Her _voice was hard, and he almost could feel the steel slice into him with it. It felt good to say a swear aloud. If she was old enough to have to deal with Peacekeepers and her father's funeral she was old enough to swear. "I don't need your or anyone's pity party. Leave me alone. Please." Her voice was strained by the time the 'please' came out, and she hated it. She didn't even want to say please. _Grown ups didn't have to say please. They gave orders and swore and did what they had to. They didn't have to say please, I don't either_. She tried to not think of Peeta's face, and how he was full of no pity at all for her. It didn't matter, she was right. She didn't need any of these people. Caring for them or having them care for her meant ugly breaks. Her first step as a grown up was to make sure no ugly breaks would happen ever again.

Peeta didn't get up. "Fine," She snarled, and took her lunch and left. She sat in the girl's bathroom, in a locked stall, and ate. She wondered how Prim was doing, and hoped that she still had a heart. _Unlike m_e, she thought as she realized a tear fell onto her lap. She told herself she was crying from anger and not of guilt with how she treated that stupid boy. She guessed that grown ups told themselves lies so that things didn't hurt as much, and she decided that if she was going to be a grown up she'd have to do this as well.

She told herself that after she left to go to her next class her eyes scanned the crowds she was not looking for anyone (lie, she was looking for Peeta). She told herself that when she caught the sight of a certain blond that it didn't hurt when he wasn't looking for her (lie, a big lie, but she couldn't face it).

* * *

The next day at lunch she sat alone. She looked up at him, at the same moment that he looked across at her, and she watched as his eyes hardened. His hand moved out, towards her a bit, as if reaching for her. Her breath hitched, even though he was on the other side of the room. And then his hand went down, and his face was resigned. He nodded once, tight and coarse, and turned away from her. She snuck more glances at his direction the rest of the lunch period, but he didn't look back at her. She didn't _want_ him to, that much was clear to him.

Only she did. She wanted him to be the kind, stubborn boy who'd follow her all over the cafeteria to just sit in silence with her. _No I don't,_ she told herself, reminded that grown ups lie to everyone, especially themselves._ I don't want that, I don't need him and his stupid presence_. She had a family to support, a family to feed and clothe and not starve. But were they even a family anymore? It felt like that string the wound around them all so tightly was severed, and Katniss was doing all she could to string them all back together. The string couldn't reach her mother though. She thought to what her mother said _her _mother once told her: _Love was mortal, and had a survival rate lower than a starving little girl stuck in the Seam_. Katniss had love for her family, the only person still alive for her to love was Prim. Her mother's life was a duty for her to ensure. Prim's footsteps were Katniss' first memory. Prim would be the only thing she let herself love, and love foolishly and hard, doing everything she could to make sure that she came out of this not only alive but with a smile. Katniss' ability to smile was suffocated by the mines, a scowl on her smooth eleven year old face showing the world that she had grown up. And that she didn't need anyone else. _I don't need these people_, she told herself again. And it felt like not a lie, but a truth that she'd have to cling to for her whole life.

When she went to her locker at the end of the day, she found two cookies in the shape of primroses.

* * *

Years passed. She broke the promise she made to her mother as a child. _Keep your song bright_, her mother told her.

Nowadays, Katniss didn't even sing. Singing was for her father, for the man whose voice could stop birds. Her father was buried in the mines, and singing was too.

_Singing wouldn't keep Prim alive_, she told herself. _Just like mother can't anymore_. She wondered idly which loss hurt more. She lost her father in an accident, dead, he was dead, but his memory was still alive and fresh and sometimes instead of making her break down and cry, Katniss could draw strength from it. Her mother was a walking corpse, serving only as a reminder of everything lost. She was dead too, in a way, in a way that felt more dead than her father was. But she didn't have a funeral, she didn't get grievers for her death. Her mother became both the one that died and the mourner. Looking at her there was no reminder of old ways, but only of what is and would be. _Don't ever fall in love,_ her eyes told Katniss. _You fall in love, and then you lose it. And when you lose it there's nothing. Make a life of something else._ Her mother's mother was right. There was only so long that love could live. Once she saw her mother staring at the birds outside their window, listening to them sing. Katniss was almost tempted to sing, to stop _their _song, but she didn't know what would be harder to deal with: her mother crying or her mother not reacting at all.

She broke the promise she made to her mother, but she really didn't dwell on it. Her mother broke more things, including promises and even herself.

* * *

"I'm thinking of volunteering, Kat."

Katniss' blood chilled. Those words from her sister. Her little sister. Reaping was so soon. Why. _Why._ Her little sister, her Prim.

"To volunteer for caretaker, y'know?" She continued when Katniss stayed silent and still. "Become a caretaker for the reaped. Help the doctors. If I'm lucky enough I'd get to stay and become a full fledged nurse."

"Or they'll make you start donating," Katniss answered, not believing that they were actually having this conversation. Her voice was hard and her brain started to spin slightly. _She doesn't mean this, she's not going to volunteer. Prim_...

Her little sister's voice became a whisper that ran through her blood. Katniss' fingernails bit into her palm. "That doesn't happen so often though, Katniss. When you volunteer for caretaking, you either become a nurse, the District Caretaker, or donate. I'm good at what I do, you know that. They'll want me to stay." She offered her big sister a smile, but it faltered when she saw her face. Prim was good at what she did sure, but she was still a little girl. She was Primrose, the only person that could make Katniss smile and the only person that Katniss truly and wholeheartedly loved. Prim was good at what she did, but she used methods from the District and plants and herbs. In the Capitol, they'd use medicines and sterile metal instruments. It was different. "I'm not volunteering to be reaped. I'm not giving myself a death sentence."

Katniss stayed silent longer. An ugly cat came mewling into the room and sat in Prim's lap. Buttercup. Prim pet the stupid ugly cat, but was paying too much attention to her sister, waiting for something, anything, to be said. Finally, Katniss stood up. She couldn't look at her little sister. "You can't bring cats to the Capitol." She left the house. Prim didn't bring up her thoughts of caretaking again, but Katniss watched with a scowl whenever her little sister would stitch up a wound or take care of a hacking cough. She could only imagine how quickly the Capitol would claw at her and take every piece of her that they could.

Would they let her keep her name even? No, probably not. Even if she'd be voted on to become a nurse, Prim wouldn't be allowed to keep her District Twelve roots, or her name. Katniss thought of Effie, and tried to imagine Prim in those wigs, with that skin, and those blank and screaming smiles.

Katniss stopped watching her little sister work on the sick and dying.

* * *

Maybe it was because the Reaping was that day. Maybe it was because she could feel a difference in the air. Katniss' mother stared without seeing as always at the wall, and for the first time in around five years, she spoke directly to Katniss. "We're low on milk."

* * *

As Katniss stood in the crowd, she watched Effie speak without speaking. She wondered, standing amongst the thousands of her district, how it'd feel to be the one person everyone was looking at, looking amongst the thousands. She thought of Effie, and tried to see her face underneath all of the Capitol that it had become. She searched her mind, to try and think if there ever was a time that she could remember Effie and who she once was. Effie back then was Ephie (The Capitol changed the spelling, cooed over the repetition of "f"s – repetition of consonants was in at that time, along with the color periwinkle). But Katniss realized that she would have no memories of Ephie from District Twelve, because Ephie became Effie of the Capitol long before Katniss could remember. Katniss thought back to the stories, and remembered that Ephie was a Seam girl herself, once upon a time.

She looked at her too pale face, wondered if that really was her own heart beating within her or if she was important enough to get reaped organs and needed them. She wondered if Effie was given donations of neighbors and friends, the Capitol thinking how precious it'd be if their wonderful new toy got their new parts from people whose names she knew.

As Katniss stared up at Effie, her eyes glazed in the Capitol vapid stare, her smile a hard toothed comb, she couldn't hate her. She wanted to, Effie was once one of them, was once Ephie from the Seam, and now she was the one that called the names of whoever was unfortunate enough to be reaped. But she couldn't hate her. She couldn't even hate her as she called the names of the the people who were to be Reaped.

"Gentlemen, first."

* * *

The reaping of the boys went first. Effie would call for any volunteers, and if there were none (there never was), her hand would go into a bowl with names on it and she'd pick the unlucky male who'd be on the next train to the Capitol. Effie would call for caretaker volunteers, and whoever ended up on the stage would walk off. Usually they just took volunteers for caretakers, and only a couple of times had there been such low numbers of caretakers that they needed to implement picking names out of a bowl for such a position (the mortality rate was a bit different with caretaking than it was with donating, so it was understandable). Effie would then repeat the same thing with the girls, and then they'd all get on the first train to the Capitol and be on their way. There were details in it all of course, more than just pick the names and leave. No more than one family member per Reaping was allowed to go to the Capitol. When you turned thirteen your name was put in for Reaping. Your name stayed in the main Reaping until you turned twenty-two. That didn't mean you were safe afterwards though. Effie could come upon the District at any time if there was an emergency. They'd pick from whoever could help the most out of there. It was bad when they had to reap from the old, who thought they escaped the Reaping and could go and live a life as uninterrupted as possible from the Capitol. It was worse when children would be picked.

One time, a six year old boy was picked. His name was spoken on the television the first night after the Donations, on the list of dead. They never say, when the list the dead, how the Reaped die, but usually it could have been prevented. It could have been stopped. It would have been, if the Capitol enjoyed them enough. The six year old kid bled to death.

District Twelve was the laughing stalk of Panem in every way possible, even including the Reaping. As if it wasn't humbling enough, being reaped for all the precious parts of yourself that the Capitol could use. Barely anyone ever volunteered, and the ones that did were for caretakers.

* * *

Someone's first Reaping was always hard to get through. Katniss was thirteen, and scared. Her hands shook a bit as she signed in, and Gale caught her eye and gave her a reassuring smile. This was going to be his second, and he seemed so at ease. When they hunted earlier, he said she had nothing to worry about.

He was wrong, she had everything to worry about. This was horrible, the worst day she ever had to live through. And she'd have to go through it every year for the next almost ten years.

She wanted to run home and vomit everything in her stomach and lay in her bed, under her covers and cry herself dead. She wanted to sneak under the fence and start running and keep running until she got to the edge of the world, whatever it looked like, and then run some more. But she had to hold herself together, if not for herself, for Prim. Everyone was required to be in the square for the Reaping, and her sister was standing on the sidelines, near the Hawthornes and even her mother. If Katniss stepped out of line, she'd disappoint her sister. They could do something to her sister. No, she had to stay strong. She would not be weak. She could not.

Her eyes wandered over the heads around her, fellow thirteen year olds that were shaking and on the verge of tears. Someone walked past her, and as they did they slightly, just lightly, brushed their hand against hers. They kept walking, and Katniss stared at the bobbing head that was just a couple of feet in front of her. It was Peeta, and she knew it wasn't an accident.

Should she tap his shoulder and finally, after all this time, say thank you? It'd probably be so awkward now, it had been a couple of years. Would he even remember? The burnt bread? Katniss knew though, that he had to, at least a little bit. Although the bruises faded, he kept a scar from the burns on his hands, she's seen them. And although bakers ended up with scars all over their hands and arms and even the bruises he got from his mother that night had disappeared, she knew the exact scars he got from scooping up the burnt pieces of bread he threw to her. They may as well scarred her name into his skin in blaring red. Every time she saw him her eyes dropped, but instead of going to the ground, they went to his hands and the scars that he had because of her.

She shook her mind and looked up at the stage at the contraption they were told was their District Caretaker._ When both me and Peeta are safe after today's Reaping_, she told herself strongly, _I will finally say thank you_. It was a lie, she never did, but that was how she got herself through every single Reaping. She'd find his blond tousled hair, whether he brushed past her or not, and she'd swear that she'll say thank you once they made it out. It almost became a sort of prayer.

* * *

She called for a volunteer, and when no male stepped forth, she didn't miss a beat. She never did, she never expected a volunteer. So her hand dug into the bowl in front of her, and pulled the name of whoever was owned by the Capitol that much more now.

Katniss stared at Effie, and tried to make her feel her glare. She wondered if Effie cried at night if she knew the family last name of whoever she announced to death. Her eyes skittered to Gale, but she looked away just as fast, too afraid to see anything familiar on a day like this. She looked back up on the stage, and looked to Haymitch. The only surviving person of District Twelve who has been reaped. Truth be told, he has been around for a while now. And his demeanor showed it. Scars adorned his body, his eyes clouded in yellow and pillowed by purple underneath. He drank to forget. To forget how his body felt empty and it was, in the figurative sense and literal.

At least he'd not be asked to give up his liver.

And Effie's voice boomed across the town and said a name. Katniss heard it, but banished it from her mind._ No, no, that wasn't what I heard, that was my mind_. _Both of us were safe every year this was not going to happen. It can't. It won't._ Grown ups lied to themselves to make things hurt less, but there was nothing else Katniss could lie about when he made his way up the steps. _Peeta Mellark was called. Peeta Mellark would be reaped. Peeta Mellark knew my laughter before he knew my name. Peeta Mellark was ticklish, especially his right side, at least when he was five. Peeta Mellark gave me cookies and bread and tried to be a friend when I needed all of that the most and I turned a cold shoulder to him and now he was going off to the Capitol to die._

Katniss made a promise to herself, to never care for anyone ever again. Gale pushed his way through that barrier of hers out of necessity, and Madge just settled within it, but she realized as he made his way up the steps that another person made his way through it as well. And a sick desperate thought coursed through Katniss at that moment, and she realized that she didn't want him to die.

* * *

_I'll thank him_, she told herself as she fidgeted outside the school, turning her head looking to catch the sight of a blond haired boy. _I'll thank him for the bread, for the cookies, for trying to sit with me and talk with me_. She thought of him, and how good he was. She tried to think if there ever was a time that he was on the bad side of gossip or talk in school, or if he ever started a fight. _The only time he was on the bad side of talk was when he was friends with me long ago._ She shook her head, and then in the midst of her muddled brain, she saw him. And he saw her. And she saw bruises on his face, where his mother hit him for burning the bread. _I only bring that boy sorrow_, she realized, and the two of them looked away from each other. She wanted to thank him, but she didn't know if she could do that without crying. _And I cannot cry, not here in front of people, in front of him_. She sighed, and turned to him again, only to look down at the ground as he did the same._ I'll try again tomorrow._

A dandelion caught her eye, and she plucked it from the ground.

* * *

Her mind spun as Effie called for volunteers for caretakers and then shoved the males (male though, just one, like most years) that were going to the Capitol off the stage. Soon she'd call out for ladies, and Katniss had to think fast. Her mind flashed to loaves of bread in the mud by her feet, and the image of her little sister in a white coat helping done up Capitol citizens. If Katniss was Reaped, Prim would be safe. Only one person per family member was allowed to go to the Capitol per year, that was a rule. She'd be able to keep her safe for another year. Give her a year and make her realize that her life in District 12 was good, better than one that Katniss could ever find, and that everyone adored her. She hoped that Rory would maybe act upon his little crush, and give Prim another thing to be tied to at home, and not try to volunteer come the later years. There was more to it of course, and she took a breath as she let her mind think it._ If I volunteer, I could finally thank Peeta. _

She wondered why it was even called volunteering. She didn't have a choice. Is this how all volunteers felt? She knew there were some along the years that were forced to volunteer, deemed unfit for life within District 12 by the Peacekeepers after one too many times breaking the rules. The Peacekeepers liked when she broke the rules though, she got them fresh meat and berries. She wasn't being forced, but she might as well be. So when Effie called for volunteers, Katniss stepped forward.

* * *

Prim screamed as Katniss walked forward, but she wouldn't look at her little sister. Gale stepped forward and took Prim away, but she wouldn't look at either of them. _Let them go, let them go._ She wouldn't say anything to them, and wouldn't look at them._ Let them go._ She let herself look at Effie instead, coming up to stand next to her at the stage. Effie's eyes were full of surprise and hurt, and Katniss realized at that moment that once upon a time, Ephie from the Seam had to have volunteered as well. She glanced again at the woman, and wondered what her reasonings were for volunteering. It was easier to think of this than to hear her little sister's tears and see her being held together by the Hawthornes. _They'll keep her okay, let them go,_ Katniss told herself as Effie skipped right to asking for volunteer caretakers. Her mother was standing off nearby the Hawthornes, but didn't hold her sister. She didn't hold them when their father died either. Her face was a blank slate, and Katniss hoped that her mother would hold onto whatever semblance she had of herself because Prim would actually need her. Katniss wondered if there ever was a time their mother was there for them. Maybe the most she ever did for them was cry harder than they did the moment they were born. It was mean and rude and wrong to think, but it helped Katniss to feel anger towards her mother instead of regret and sadness. Prim would be taken care of by the Hawthornes, Hazelle would never let the little girl starve.

No one else volunteered. Effie scooted her off the stage alone, as the mayor read about official Capitol business. The history of Panem and the land that used to be called North America. How disease and death spread through and how there seemed to be no end. How the Dark Days almost killed everyone off. How the Capitol rose out of the rubble and plagues and became strong and fit. How the Districts were built to house the unworthy to do work for the Capitol, and when time came, to be reaped. Katniss barely listened to the speech, she never really did. She ran her finger over different parts of her body, wondering what they would be taking from her. Her hand stuck at her heart, and she drummed her fingers against her skin to her heartbeat. _How many were left? _She asked herself, stuck in a mindset where she felt like she was not really herself. When the speech was done, Effie took her by the arm and shoved her into a car to go to the train station alone. The boys (boy, there were no volunteers for caretaking for boys either this year) would already be there and in the train, and the caretaker and past donors went in a different car. Haymitch made sure to drink an extra shot or four before getting into the car with Effie. Peeta tried to catch a last glimpse at his family and bakery from the tinted window, and wished that they were allowed to speak some last words to them. Katniss sat quietly and stared straight ahead.

* * *

She remembered her prayer._ We'll make it through the Reaping, and when we do I'll tell him thank you._

He got Reaped. It was the year she decided she'd volunteer.

After all these years of having this mantra in her head, it only made sense, really. A sort of pact that he wasn't aware of. Now all she had to do was say thank you.

* * *

It seemed fit for her, for the both of them, that after being reaped, she would reach out to him. Being reaped meant an expiration date was tattooed upon you. Even if you made it past your first, you weren't done (they weren't done with you). You had to keep pleasing the Capitol. If you ever let them know how tired you really were, you'd be placed on the table with an "x" over a vital organ. It was the unspoken rule that the moment you are deemed to be Reaped, you cut your ties with anyone and everyone. It's the reason they don't allow any time for you to say goodbye to your family. The newly Reaped never speak to one another, really. Those that survive the first Reaping sometimes reach out to other survivors, but it takes a long while, not wanting to go too close too soon. The Capitol could find out and exploit it, or one of them could just easily be put on the table to die. It hurt more. When someone was to be Reaped, it was expected that they would never reach out to another living soul again. So Katniss, after her years of never reaching out, went to sit down next to Peeta on the train. He fidgeted as if to move, and she shot him a look. "You keep running off and I'll keep following."

She didn't mean to say it, but the words slipped out. Those words. The words he said to her, all those years ago. When _she_ shut everyone off and_ he_ reached out. She wondered if he realized that these were those words.

He did, and maybe that's what made him stay. He shut himself down, decided he'd have to start getting ready to die. And this ghost of his past sat next to him. Only, she wasn't a ghost of his past. She was a girl, a living breathing girl, and she was of his past and present. Future? Well, they both didn't have that long of a one, but he guess they'd have that too. He'd take that selfishly as well. He wondered if hers would be the last face he'd see. He'd like that.

When he didn't move, she sat more comfortably as the two of them stared out the window of the passing landscape.

* * *

He made his way through the District in the cold dark night for her house. He felt foolish and stupid, but he had to. She was basically a stranger to him. But she knew _her. _Not as well as he did (_no one did_, he told himself with each footstep pounding into the soot covered sidewalk. _No one knew her like I did and no one will_), but she still knew her. She still lost her. And maybe she felt the same way, because on his way to her house, Gale ran into Madge.

They never really spoke. Maybe a muttered hello when both of them crossed paths because of Katniss, a retort when selling strawberries (Katniss, still there, still always there). And so the two of them looked at each other and their eyes were full of fear. It felt like a betrayal, to see each other without her, without Katniss there. He thought for a moment he should run, not feeling like the brave strong self he prided himself of being but just very afraid. Madge realized how big and tall he was when they met under the curtain of twilight, without Katniss around. _He could snap my neck easily_, she reflected off-handedly. He was big, and strong, and all she did when she came upon him was wind her arms around him. "I'm sorry," She said of her behavior to him. Already she felt her tears come and they soaked his grey shirt turning it black (not that you could see it; the night protected them from prying eyes) and she buried her face into this chest of a stranger. _But he wasn't a stranger to her, and he's all I have of her_. Katniss was the only person to treat her like a human being most of the time. The rest of the town, both Merchants and those from the Seam, ostracized her like she was to be Reaped, her father's title of "Mayor" creating a division between her and her classmates than could ever be created over time. Her hands gripped at his shirt, gripped hard, as if it was her lifeline, and maybe it was. "I'm sorry," she repeated. "I'm crying on you and hugging you and you don't even know me but you knew..._know_... you know her."

And he closed his eyes and laid his head on top of hers and found his arms go around her as well. He hugged Katniss once before, and it was so long ago Gale wondered if he really ever did or if he just took a memory and pushed the truth of it all around until it ended with his arms around her. But this was real, and that hurt. It wasn't that the hug with Madge was bad – it was actually good, and somehow, even with how small she was, he felt a warmth flood through him that seeped out the moment he heard the word "volunteer" earlier that day in the square. It hurt because the only reason they had to find each other, had to hold each other and cry (he felt the wetness on his cheeks and realized that he was crying, fucking crying, as well), was because they lost her. He held her, or maybe she held him, and there was no one else on the street, but somehow it still felt wrong. She should be there, smacking them on the heads for having the gall to show emotion so plainly. She should be there, running to the woods with Gale and telling Madge she'd be right back with some strawberries for her.

"I was looking for you," He told her, and she didn't move but rather stilled in his arms. "You were the only person I could think of going to. My family felt bad, but they all knew her like she was part of the family. Prim is devastated, and sleeping on the couch in my house. Her mother..." He stopped himself and shook his head. That wasn't important. Her mother was more dead than ever before. "You knew her friendship. We both did. We both lost her." It was dangerous to speak like so, but he did anyway. He was never afraid to, and he wasn't about to gain a fear of speaking his goddamn mind when they took away one of the people he cared most about. "We both lost her to the Capitol. It's their fault. She's gone. I'm not watching their interviews. I'm not watching a goddamn thing they are going to show this year about the Reaped." He felt her nod, and that was all he felt like he needed. Someone had to understand the loss of a friend to the Capitol. He knew that people all over the different Districts, all over the years, have known this kind of loss, to some degree or the other. But now it was personal. Now suddenly, he was in the middle of it all.

They let go of each other, and stared at each others water-logged eyes. They both were such statues, such beings void of emotion. But the day was long and the night was lonesome and somehow, they both felt the need to reach out to the other and reach the ability to claw at that emotion deep within them. "She's already lost and gone," Madge's voice spoke out, and Gale nodded. They both brought their three middle fingers to their mouth and kissed them, and then held them out against one another's. A traditional goodbye salute from the older times in District 12.

The night was still between the two of them, and a wild dog out in the woods had a howl that cut through the dark. They nodded at each other, and turned to the opposite sides of the town where they belonged.

* * *

She reached out and grabbed his wrist on impulse. He turned to her, confused. The train went on, and they swayed lightly at it. Trees passed and landscapes, but they didn't look out the window, her eyes were fixed on his and his on hers. The sun was starting to set. Was that all really happening? She would easily believe that this wasn't real, that the things passing by the window were screens to pretend that they were traveling. Nothing really seemed real.

Nothing, but the flesh that she gripped tightly to.

And that's why she did it. He became her anchor in between one heartbeat and the next. The next week, what would it hold? What did she really get herself into by doing this? Was she mad? Was anything around her real, or was this all some terrible horrible dream? He was real, Peeta was real. His wrist in her hand gave way to his heartbeat, hard and drumming against her fingertips. His skin was warm, a slight sheen of sweat at the beginning of his palms, his nerves showing. He was real, and he was alive, and he reinforced the fact that she was real and alive, and everything around her everything she was going through, was real. She took a deep breath, and felt his hand move underneath hers to grip at her wrist as well. Her heartbeat echoed through his fingertips, and the two beats boom boom doom boomed together.

Real. Alive. For now, they were still alive.

* * *

Haymitch stumbled through, and shooed Katniss to get ready for dinner. Peeta stood up, but the older man took his arm. Peeta looked at him in alarm, ready to steady the drunken fool, but saw that he was standing quite fine and balanced. He looked at him in question, and Haymitch slapped him on the back and nodded his head down the hallway. "She volunteered, you know." He laughed again, but there seemed to be no humor within it. He brought his eyes level to Peeta's. "She's got..spunk." He looked as if he was going to laugh again, but instead he stared down the hallway towards her room. There seemed to be a sorrow that clung to him like a cologne. Haymitch turned without another word and went to his room, and Peeta knew the man was going to try to quiet his own humorless laugh and sadness into a bottle.

He knew that he should go to his own room and get ready for dinner, but Peeta instead sat back down. Katniss volunteered. His head felt like it was spinning, and he felt rather confused. Volunteered? Katniss volunteered for the Reaping? The first thought he had whenever Katniss did something irrational was Prim, but that didn't exactly make sense because they ask for volunteers before a random is selected. Maybe Prim would have discussed something with her? It didn't make sense though, Prim didn't seem ever a person to volunteer for death.

Neither did Katniss, though. And yet that apparently was exactly what she did.

Peeta was ready to just start counting his final breaths and die. He didn't really have a chance to make enough of an impression to make it past his first donation, no one ever did from District 12. And what would he do if he did? Live in the Capitol, talking only to people with their death hanging around them, waiting to scoop them up into his heavy arms? Death would be kinder. He was ready for that.

He was not ready, however, for Katniss to be the other one to be Reaped. And they sat so close, she made sure of it, and she reached out for him. He cursed himself, and her too, and wondered why this all had to happen now, on the train to the Capitol. The way things were going, Katniss would probably talk to him more in just this week than ever in her life. But she volunteered. Volunteered. There's always a reason to do something like that, and Peeta knew she'd have to have a damn good one.

His thoughts of getting ready to die left his mind. All of it was consumed by the thought of Katniss, and the reason she volunteered. He decided he'd find out, even if it was the last thing he did.  
Which, given the circumstances, was very possible.

* * *

Sleep didn't come easy. Katniss woke up with a scream of a nightmare, where a shadowed figure took a saw blade and cut into her while she was still awake. The figure took her heart, and squeezed as she watched, and as the face came into focus it was her father, his usual happy demeanor twisted into a sadistic sneer and eyes that almost seemed red.

Katniss left her room on the train and went in the seating room onto a couch. She didn't turn on the television, but rather just sat there with her head in her hands and tried to calm her breathing down. She tried to fill her mind with the dark greens and rich browns of the woods, not ever wanting the image of her father like that in her mind again. Her childhood was like a precious locket hung around her neck, and the thought of Capitol corrupting the image of her father (it was their fault, theirs. It might have been her unconsciousness, and her dreams, but it always came down to the Capitol) stung and it took everything in her to not puke out everything that was within her. _Let's see the Capitol take a decent organ if I've vomited them all out_, she thought to herself, trying to poke fun. It was a good thing it was just a joke to herself, although even she found it tasteless. There were no tears, and she was thankful for that.

"Katniss?" A voice called out from the doorway, and she cursed herself from not hearing the approach. Some hunter.

"Hey Peeta," she answered without taking her head out of her hands, and she heard him make his way to where she sat. The couch moved down to her left, and she could feel his presence there. She tried to take in his presence, his warmth, and allow herself be comforted by it. She wanted to be selfish because she was so tired and just so done with it all, she just wanted to be able to sleep. "Couldn't sleep either?" she asked.

He laughed under his breath and agreed. She turned to look at him, and every thought of comforting her left. She looked at his eyes, and her heart dropped. And she cried.

Her tears came to her suddenly and with a hard force. She tried to bury her head in her hands again, but she couldn't hide them. Peeta stared at her for a second, absolutely terrified. She looked at him, and broke out into tears. _You're a real charmer,_ he thought darkly, but pushed it aside as he scooted closer to Katniss and put his arms around her, drawing circles into her back.

She tried to speak. "I'm sorry," she stuttered out finally. She looked up at him again, her tears coming freely and faster as she looked at him again. Her hand was shaking as she brought it up and laid it on his cheek. She brought up the other and laid it on the other, and she held his face still. She forced herself to look at his eyes. His eyes, blue and light and playing and they seemed to dance with life, even filled with the sorrow that they now held. "It's just...your eyes." They danced and twirled and sung and played and _I already let them go I had to so why weren't they just gone_? "They remind me of Prim's."

His heart sunk. He would always serve as a reminder as her little sister she'd never have again, then. She stared at him and his eyes for a while longer, trying to will herself to stop crying. She couldn't. Her fingertips touched his hair slightly and _god even that has Prim written all over it._ He'd pass as her sibling faster than she, the Merchant obvious in Prim's looks. She forced herself to stare again, stare longer and harder until his eyes were blue, just blue and nothing else in the damn world was blue. His eyes weren't like the sky or the ocean or blue like bluebirds or berries or even blue like her sister's eyes (_don't think her name, don't say it just don't_); They were the only blue that existed now.

She sighed deep and allowed herself to collapse with her forehead against his chest as he continued to rub circles on her back. She tried to pull away and not accept comfort, not accept anything of this, but she was tired. She was so, so tired of everything and it all. And it's been a long time since someone was her shoulder to cry on, and not the other way around. She'd be selfish tonight, yes, and allow herself to lay with her head against his chest.

* * *

She wondered how much her mother's mother knew of the Seam and starving girls. The survival rate of a starving girl stuck in the Seam, Katniss realized, was low. The survival rate of three starving girls in the Seam was even lower. Katniss didn't know what to do. Her mind was jumbled from lack of food, her stomach pains not helping her think either.

Was this how love felt? Lost and desperate, and an overhang of failure? How dreadful.

The rain only added to the feeling of desperation and hopelessness of her situation. It had no symbolic meaning, there was no turning point or baptism. It was just rain, just water, and it beat down upon her as if to remind her how heavy the world was. She couldn't sell anything. Not selling anything meant she couldn't get money. No money meant no food. No food meant that they'd all die, die like her father, die like love, like how her mother's mother had warned.

Baby clothes of Prim's fell into a puddle and she couldn't bend to pick it up.

There was nothing left in the trash of the Merchant's for her to take. She cursed herself, and wondered how much longer it'd be until she took to going door to door and hoping for a kind heart to give her scraps of anything. Words flew out into the rainy cold night, and she realized that the woman was yelling at her. Katniss looked up from the trashcan she was in, and saw the baker's wife in an uproar. Seam filth, she screamed about. Seam filth. Katniss wanted to shake her head and correct her. _Cold and hungry Seam filth, from a cold and hungry Seam family. Don't worry Miss, we're likely to starve soon and we'll be out of your hair then, yes. _

Blue eyes reflected brightly in the rain, and Katniss stared at them. They were sad, and it struck Katniss hard. Not pity for her, that wasn't in his eyes (and he'd never pity her, would he? He'd feel her pain with her, not about her). Katniss shook her head, and tried to get the blue to stop exploding behind her closed eyes. She walked a bit away and sat by an apple tree.

As he walked back into the bakery behind his mother, he noticed how warm he was by the ovens. And how dry. He hated himself for it a little, how much better off he was than Katniss. It wasn't fair. And there was nothing he could do about it. That ached hard and deep within him. He went back to work, getting ready to take out the bread just to put more within the ovens. His mother was washing her hands, pretending to be busy so as to not have to work. He refused to look at her, angrier at her than he ever felt for how she treated Katniss. He turned back to the ovens and the flames. And the bread upon it all.

His mind started working fast. What if he burnt some of the bread? Burning the bread made it so that they couldn't sell it. His mother would scream, probably hit him, but if he did that she'd make him throw it out most likely. And he'd be able to feed her. He threw two loaves into the flames and then quickly went to retrieve them. Not quickly enough, they were burnt, and he made sure his mother heard him scrambling. As the bread burned his hands, he felt pain and whole and happiness all at once.

Was this how love felt? Scorching, fast, and too much too quickly? How wonderful.

His mother smacked him good and hard with a rolling pin, and he was brought back to reality. To the pigs, she screamed at him, her worthless son. The burnt bread would go to the pigs. So Peeta ran outside with it and when his mother wasn't looking he threw it instead at Katniss. Their eyes met and his were fierce while hers faltered and questioned. He hated that. He hated how she seemed to give up, and how her eyes showed that. But she looked at the loaves of bread and he saw something ignite, if just for a second. He turned to go back in, seeing enough. When she looked up to ask why, or say thank you, or do something because Peeta, Peeta saved her life right there already, she found herself alone. She took the loaves and ran home. She thought to the day her father died, and the next day after when Peeta tried to sit next to her and she shut him out.

_Perhaps,_ she let herself think for the first time, _that was a mistake_.

* * *

"You don't have to avoid looking at me now, you know," Katniss said after they finished up breakfast. It was their first day in the Capitol, and the first day of the tests. They both were dreading it, both scared, and both knew already they were entirely alone except for the other body right next to them.

Peeta looked over at her, surprised she noticed. She looked right back, right in his eyes, and didn't even blink. "I know that you're afraid I'm going to start crying again like I did last night, but I'm not going to, alright? I'm fine. It was just late and I was tired, and it was too much. But I'm fine now."

And she was, and he smiled at her and she smiled back. Within minutes they wouldn't be able to smile. But in between the then and now, it almost felt easy to pretend that they could smile. And so they did.

"See? No tears," She said, smiled, and nudged Peeta's shoulder with her own. He laughed, trying to suppress the amount that he actually wanted to smile and laugh at this. He might have made her cry last night without meaning to, but now she was smiling, laughing, joking, with him. At him maybe a bit, but he didn't care. Her laughter rang out like a birdsong, like he heard stopped because of her own singing long, long ago.

She looked up at him again, made sure to take in his eyes. She didn't feel pain from seeing them. _His eyes are blue_, she thought to herself. No thoughts of her dear sweet sister came to her mind. _His eyes are blue, and it's a nice blue. _She thought of what lay ahead of them, and the fact that maybe those eyes wouldn't open again soon.

She looked away.

She wondered when she'd finally get the stupid courage to say thank you.

* * *

Katniss tried to not pay attention to any of the others that were reaped. She refused to learn their names, to talk to them, or anything. She already had to deal with the burden that she was here, that Peeta was here. She didn't need to deal with that with anyone else.

But then a little girl from Eleven smiled at her and got her blood pressure checked near Katniss. Katniss tried to not look at her but couldn't help it. _She's just as small as Prim_...

And then she caught Katniss' eye and smiled. Katniss found her smiling back without even trying, it was contagious. Her brown eyes were both bright and warm, her skin dark and in contrast against the bleached out hospital feel around them all. "I'm Rue."

"Katniss," she answers, and she hears a warmth in her voice that been gone since she came to the Capitol.

Rue sat closer to her during the tests. When they had to check blood type, Katniss reached her hand out to hold Rue's without even thinking twice. And just like that, another person made it past Katniss' wall, and she cared.

* * *

"You," a voice called out. Katniss sighed in frustration, not wanting to have to deal with another person and what most likely would become another test. She turned, expecting a doctor, but instead came face to face with a dazzling boy who seemed just a couple of years older than herself.

"Me?" She asked.

His lips formed a smile. "Yes. You. And me." He stuck his hand out. "Finnick Odair."

Things clicked in her mind as she shook his hand. "Katniss Everdeen." Her mind tried to collect what she knew of him. He was picked to be Reaped a couple of years ago. The Capitol fell in love with his charm, and his body. He now donates his blood for when called upon by the Capitol Reapings, but besides that there was talk that he still was donating full time. Katniss wasn't sure what to believe, but she heard that the Capitol citizens looked towards him donating time with him and his body rather than pluck out organs from him until he died off. She suppressed a shudder.

"I know who you are," he said smirking. "You're the girl who volunteered for Reaping. And let me say, you've created quite a stir. I very much would just love to talk to you, and introduce you to a couple of people." Katniss tensed at that. Was he going to introduce her to one of his customers? Was the plan to sell her as well? _No, please, take my spine instead. Take something that will kill me. _

Finnick seemed to notice her stature, because he placed his arm over his shoulder. "Don't worry. It's just past survivors of the Reapings. They've been just _dying_ to meet you." Finnick paused for a minute then, and thought of his choice of words. Laughed. He directed his hand to the small of her back and directed her out of the doors of all the tests she had been going through and to a sitting station. "What about Peeta?" Katniss asked, quietly.

Finnick looked a bit confused. "You mean the other Reaped from Twelve?" She nodded. He shrugged his shoulders and mumbled incoherencies about how it was her, the girl who volunteered for all of this that they wanted to meet. He popped a sugar cube in his mouth and asked if she wanted one.

She scowled, ignoring the sugar cube. "I don't want to meet anyone if Peeta doesn't meet them either."

Finnick's face flashed with a hundred things at once that Katniss couldn't pick out. Understanding? Anger? Sadness? Determination? He washed that away quick and smiled. He narrowed his eyes a bit, trying to figure her out. His hand on the small of her back pushed her towards the right. "To Peeta it is then."

They found Peeta and the three of them went down the hallway in silence. Finnick hummed a tune, and Peeta turned to look at Katniss, questioning. She shrugged; she had no idea what was going on either.

"We usually don't try and meet people before their first donation," Finnick said as they got closer to double doors to a sitting area. "You understand why of course." They did. Why get close to someone that can be snatched away just like that? Then again, all of them could, always. If someone needed an emergency donation in the Capitol, there usually wasn't time to go to a District to reap. They'd pick from the waiting ducks here, already with their death guaranteed. Not even Finnick's looks could stop that. "But we'll make an exception for you," He said, and he meant just Katniss but realized, that he meant both. Because if Katniss was so adamant on not going somewhere without Peeta, he had to be interesting as well. This was dangerous thinking and Finnick knew it, but he didn't think he could stop it. He'd care if either of these two died, already he realized that. The fact that they were from District 12, where there haven't been anyone who survived past the first donation in over twenty years, he was sure that it'd be lucky if even one of them made it out. And yet, he opened the door for them, and led them to the only people he had left in the world.

He tried to hide it, but Katniss saw. His eyes went automatically to a girl with a mop of curly hair, a nervous smile that seemed to bloom when her eyes met Finnick's, and eyes searching and waiting for him. She sat alone amongst all the others mingling together, and seemed out of place. She was. She was the female from District Four that was Reaped this year. It seemed to Katniss that her and Peeta weren't the only ones being taken in by this group before their first donation.

But then Finnick looked away from her, made himself look away, and turned back to the two at his side.

* * *

People fall in love in different ways.

It grows over time with some people, and holds them alight. As if they're holding onto a balloon that gets filled with more and more helium until suddenly, they take off. And when their feet leave the ground, they realize what it is.

For some it's quick and swift, like a knife cutting their throat. It hurts just as much and it trickles throughout.

For some it's a sunrise, a sudden addition of light in the dark. A steady growth in colorful hues until suddenly, fully, the sun is up and the sky is true.

Other's say it's like a cup of coffee. Hot and scalding and bitter, bitter against their tongue. And then just like that the sugar is added, it cools down, and everything within wakes up.

For Finnick, it was always the ocean. When he was young, all of his time was spent with the sand in between his toes and the sea salt air threading through his hair. His family loved him and he loved them back, but the ocean took his heart. He loved it without the feeling of the born necessity to love it; he just did. The waves broke against him and the cold of it all made him feel nothing but warmth.

He always knew Annie, they grew up together. She was a good friend always, and she even cried for him when he was Reaped. Something stirred within him, and when he saw her tears, he thought of the ocean._ Saltwater, _his mind went back to._ Saltwater. _

She was his last thought when he was put under for his first donation. He didn't understand it, couldn't, but that was fine because soon he was under and maybe, just maybe he'd never have to think about it again. She was his first thought waking up as well. Her and her smile, her on the oceanside, saltwater, salty air, but most of all her. She was a low-tide, creeping upon his mind when he didn't even realize. She was a high-tide, demanding him to look in her direction every time he stood on the stage in District Four for reapings, to try and find a way to speak to her every year he got to go home but never finding the ability. She was the saltwater, and he felt pulled under when her name was called. And the first night on the train, when he shook because she was picked, _Annie, Annie for chrissakes had to live this fate now too_, her lips on his was a tsunami that pulled him under and jerked and pulled and threw him through the night. He didn't know if he'd catch another breath, and he didn't know if he wanted to.

When Finnick thought of love, he thought of the ocean.

* * *

"Who'd you bring us now, Finnick?" A voice called out to the pair of three at the door. Finnick smiled at the girl the scowl and brought the two over to her and the group she was in.

"It's Katniss, and Peeta," He said gesturing to them. He introduced them to Johanna and the nodded and said hellos. They looked helpless and scared, total fish out of water, and he understood that feeling. He felt like that when he first came to the Capitol. Most days he still felt like that, if he was being honest with himself. "They're the–"

"Yeah, yeah. I know who they are. This year's dead from District Twelve." Johanna watched them closely to react. That would judge how she treated them for the rest of their time here alive. Or maybe not, really. She never was known to be a people person, and everyone just tolerated her. She was pretty sure no one in this room particularly cared for her, but that was for the better. The Capitol taught her well; the less people you care about the less people you have that they can hurt (because they will hurt them, they will hurt you, and the only thing that caring does is put a big target on the person).

The boy, Peeta, blinked, but nothing else out of the ordinary. His hands didn't tense, his jaw didn't tighten. His eyes seemed to question her slightly, but it seemed more to try and judge her character rather then the fact that she called out their mortality. A good actor, she reasoned, and turned to the girl, Katniss. The girl had her eyes narrowed at Johanna, and Johanna wanted to laugh. There was a fight in this girl, and Johanna knew that soon it'd be gone. The Capitol would make sure of it. They'd find out why she had volunteered, who she was trying to save (because why else would someone volunteer? It's always out by now if someone was a forced volunteer for lack of discipline, no this girl had to have volunteered to save someone), and then they'd break her. And take the fight out of her. Johanna wanted to slap her on the back and tell her welcome to the Capitol because she knew it'd set her off. It was a thing that would set Johanna off. Johanna still had a fight in her, if she could even call it that. It was more of a defense. She knew that most of the Capitol didn't like her, called her cold and called for her final donation to be made soon, but they were all afraid that her ghost would find a way back and hurt or haunt them.

She liked that they thought that. She liked that they thought she was that strong.

"Johanna can we please try this year to not make any of the new kids cry?" Finnick asked tiredly. When he said 'we,' it was obvious he only meant her. The only other people in their group was Mags and Beetee, and neither of them were so cold.

"I'm not making them cry. Are either of you going to cry?" She cocked her eyebrow to the two of them. They shook their heads. She smiled back at Finnick. "Look. Tough skin. That's a good trait for a corpse, you know."

Beetee stepped forward and moved to bring Johanna away from them. "Johanna, I actually wanted to discuss something with you about–"

His voice cut out and Finnick smiled and looked over at the older woman amongst them. "How are you doing, Mags?" His voice was soft, softer than any other voice Katniss heard being used in the Capitol, and she wondered how someone got to her age when they had to donate for so long. She muttered unintelligible words and clicks, and Finnick nodded and they got into a conversation. Peeta stole a glance at Katniss, and she just shrugged. What was the point of bringing them here if all of these people were just going to introduce themselves and then have their own conversations?

Just at that thought, the curly haired girl that Katniss saw Finnick look to joined them. "Hi," She said, her smile taking over her face. The two of them found themselves smiling back automatically, her happiness and warmth felt like something contagious. "I'm Annie. I'm from District Four and I'm also newly Reaped this year."

"Katniss, from District Twelve," Katniss said, shaking the girl's hand. "And Peeta." He copied Katniss' movements and shook Annie's hand as well.

Annie looked around, her eyes dancing with a life that Katniss wasn't sure could ever grow in a District or stay around in the Capitol. Her eyebrows furrowed at them. "Are there any others from District Twelve around?"

Katniss frowned. "No... we have Haymitch but he's not around."

"He's probably hiding from the doctors right now and drinking," Peeta added.

Annie laughed, and the sound brought Finnick's attention away from Mags. The two of them joined the circle that Annie, Peeta and Katniss created. Katniss saw Finnick's hand touch the small of Annie's back, and quickly move away. And Finnick saw that Katniss saw, and Katniss knew that he knew. He flashed her a smile, and somehow within it all, she knew what she saw was a secret.

* * *

"Hold up, Katniss. Can I talk to you?"

Katniss had more tests to do – always more tests to take, more pills to swallow, more beeps and blips and needles – but she nodded. Peeta looked back at her, questioning, but continued down the hall without her as Finnick Odair made his way to her. He motioned for her to follow, and she did without question. Maybe she should have questioned, questioned why she let Peeta go, why she didn't ask where they were going, but she just followed. He veered suddenly, into a door that she didn't see before, and suddenly they were in a small abandoned room that looked like one time it was used to for the testing.

She looked at him cautiously, unsure of why he pulled her aside, and why they were in an abandoned room. He wasn't looking at her, but instead looking at the walls and the ceiling and muttered to himself. Katniss looked around the room too, although was unsure what she was supposed to look for. _Was there something to look for?_ Finnick seemed sure to find something, and Katniss felt awkward standing there not moving. So her eyes moved throughout the room, combing it for...irregularities? She wasn't sure but she felt a bit foolish.

Her eyes fell upon a vase of white roses. They were in every room, usually stark white, somehow even brighter than the sterile white walls, and always fresh, as if someone came and changed them daily (which they did). But these had been ignored, the edges browning and even some petals had fallen on the table. The roses were the most potent smelling roses that Katniss had ever come across in her life, but as she got closer to the vase of the dead ones, they seemed even more potent. The smell was all-encompassing and she felt dizzy, so dizzy. Was the room beginning to blur at the edges? Her hands gripped the small table as she tried to steady herself and she closed her eyes.

"Flower?" She opened her eyes to find Finnick right next to her, his hand held out with one of the wilting white roses in his hand. A smile was on his face, but she could tell by his eyes that he was scrutinizing her and trying to figure her out. _Could he not smell these roses?_ Katniss asked herself. _Am I the only one that seems to be hit by the smell of them?_ No, he was probably just used to it after all this time.

"No." She moved his hand away from her, his hand that held the flower, and took a step away. "I hate roses." She didn't hate roses. Or rather, she never really truly thought of them. She loved primroses, but that was just for her sister and her sister's namesake. Plain roses though never meant anything to her, but she couldn't ever seem to escape them here within the Hospitals of the Capitol. It seemed as if they held a sinister secret behind their petals, their overpowering smells both luring and putrid. It was too much for Katniss, and her eyes always went to locate where the roses were in every room she entered.

"You hate roses?" Finnick asked as he sat in a seat and pulled one across from him.

Katniss sat down. "Yes."

"I've never come across someone with a hate for roses." He was still smiling. It felt too controlled, too posed.

"Yeah, well now you have," Katniss told him as she rolled her shoulder, trying to do something casual so as to not let it off that she picked up on his unease.

"Well, what kind of flower do you like? In case I ever have to woo you, of course," His smile was bigger now and real. He got a kick out of this, out of flirting. He liked it when it meant nothing to the other participant, when he used it just as a method to distract rather than to comply to Snow. When the flirting wasn't used as a distract but rather a means to an end though, an end upon a bed (or a table, or even an elevator, or god knows wherever they can fit in between his legs honestly), was when it hurt a bit more, when it made his smile that much tighter. But he could already read this girl in front of him, this Katniss, and could almost taste her purity and lack of flirt appeal. It almost felt like a sent miracle.

She cocked her eyebrow at him, and a word tumbled out without her meaning it to. "Dandelions."

"What?"

She cursed herself. Should she had said something else? Maybe her own name, Katniss, although she wasn't named after a flower but rather a potato root. _My sister was named after a flower, and I a potato. How absolutely fitting._ And maybe another reason she was here in the Capitol, and making sure her sister wasn't. Her sister would wilt like the flower she was. But Katniss, Katniss would survive and grow underneath the soil and the mud, strong. She had to. She tried to erase her mind of those thoughts, of her sister and of memories of bread still warm in a rainstorm threatening to overcome her mind. "I like dandelions."

"Dandelions are a weed," Finnick said, shaking his head at her.

She frowned in thought. _A weed?_ What, a nuisance, something that refused to not grow? The thought of yellow hidden amongst the grass, of eyes that reached out for her but darted away from her once she looked as well, of food on the table and her mother's vacant stares being replaced by moments of almost alertness. That was a bit much to go into though, wasn't it? And she wasn't too sure if she wanted to go into it with anyone. And not Finnick, he was a stranger, really. _Everyone here is a stranger. Except..._ but no, not him. She most certainly couldn't talk to _him_ about dandelions.

So she just shrugged at the handsome boy in front of her, and let herself smile as well. "Well, I like dandelions."

"Fine, then. You like weeds. I've always been partial to seaweed."

"Are we sitting in this room alone to talk about plants, Finnick?" Katniss' tone was flat, and she cut right to it. She knew that they weren't sitting in the room to just speak of plants. He had something he wanted to say to her and her specifically. She had a feeling she knew what it was about, his hand on the small of the back of the girl named Annie flashed in her mind, but she didn't bring up her suspicions. She'd let him bring it up.

"No. We aren't, and of course you know this. We're here to talk about secrets."

That surprised her. "Secrets?"

"Which are, in some ways, like weeds. How they just seem to appear. How they grow. How with just the flutter of air, they have suddenly spread throughout an entire meadow. Do you like secrets too, Katniss?" Secrets and weeds. Katniss just wished for Finnick Odair to speak plainly with her.

"I don't have secrets. I'm too bad of a liar to have them."

He looked at her for a moment, a smile still on but he narrowed his eyes. "I suppose you are. Everyone has secrets though. Some that are more powerful and valuable than just money. Which, I would know about. I have an overabundance of both." He crossed his one leg over the other and put his hands behind his head. He was completely casual, his tone as well, and everything set Katniss on edge. "Everyone does, as long as you make it past your first Reaping. But the difference between me and everyone else, besides my stunning looks and excruciating popularity," he flashed a smile and Katniss rolled her eyes, "is that I hold more secrets of others than of my own." He paused. "And you, you Katniss my dear, should be holding onto more as well. Since of course, you don't have any secrets of your own. But you do hold the beginning of someone else's secret, don't you? You hold one of mine."

_His hand holding the small of her back_. "I might," She answered quietly, looking right into his eyes. She wasn't challenging him, but rather letting him take control of the conversation. She didn't want to voice any of her assumptions or anything.

"So. Ask me."

She looked at him, questioning. Ask him? _The small of her back._ "Tell me," she replied.

He laughed. "I do hope you make it past your first donation, Katniss. You are just the kind of friend I could need." And she was. She didn't fall for his flirting, and that was something he admired in a person. She was owned by the Capitol, just like him. She was a horrible liar, but she still had so many secrets, she was made of them. And so was he. And for the first time in a long time, he wanted someone to confide in. He didn't want to just be the person that others told their secrets to in a comfortable afterglow in between sheets. He wanted someone to know about Annie, he _needed_ someone to. Mags of course did, but he didn't even need to say anything. Mags was like his family, and she could tell after his first Donation what the girl meant to him, sooner than he was able to even tell. Finnick leaned forward towards Katniss and smirked. "Alright I'll tell you," He whispered, and she bent her head down towards Finnick to hear him. "Annie and I are in love." A beat. "And I'm scared."

Katniss sat up at that, and looked at this boy. (Boy? Man? He was older than her, defined as a man surely by all of the Capitol, but in front of her was truly a boy.) Finnick Odair. In love. And scared? She thought of how much she's seen of him over the years. Not too much, there wasn't usually electricity, but he seemed to always be on the television whenever she turned it on. His easy smile always made girls in the school hallways whisper and giggle. On his arm was always some wealthy Capitol citizen or another, fawning over him, paying for his company. She remembered girls shrieking at a love poem they once heard Finnick Odair wrote, and how they fantasized it to be about them. But it wasn't about them. It wasn't about someone from the Capitol either, was it? No, it was about Annie. Annie, the girl that seemed to be built of sunshine that was up for a donation.

He was in love, and he was scared. And Katniss didn't want to, but she felt afraid for him too.

Finnick sat up as well, mimicking this girl in front of him. "Of course you can understand, at least to some point, why I'm afraid. Love is a foolish thing, isn't it? It makes us care for people. I know that you know this fear, it's why you're here. I deal with secrets, Katniss Everdeen, and I heard of a whisper of a little girl that is your sister, with blonde hair and a smile that could even make you smile."

His voice was lighthearted, but she felt threatened. Her eyes felt like they could burn. "How do you know this? Why are you saying this?" Her chest clutched tightly and for one immature moment she just wanted to be back home, no matter the consequences.

"I deal in secrets, Katniss. I told you that before." Her eyes were panicked and narrowed. Her hand twitched, an instinct she grew to have and she thought to herself about how she wished she had her bow. "I'm not threatening you with anything. I told you, I want you to be my friend." She was wary of him. This is probably why he was interested in her, he got some information about her and wanted more. She took a deep breath, knowing there was no use to fight it, and nodded her head. "I... I'm in love and it scares me. That's all. I'm scared with what will happen in her first donation. If she will make it. I'm scared of what will happen if," His eyes, almost instinctively look around the room and he draws closer to Katniss as his voice drops to a whisper, "if they find out how much I truly care for her. Because that is a dangerous thing, Katniss Everdeen. You need to know this."

She looked at him, eyes searching all over his face. _What is he telling me? _

He smiled, but stayed close to her, stayed whispering, and continued. "They will learn eventually, about my feelings for her. Or at least some of them. Maybe they already know. I'll hear the whispers soon. They always make it to my ear." A grimace of a smile, not a plastic fake one, and Katniss realized just how much he was letting her in. His eyes turned to hers in a sudden powerful manner, and Katniss felt herself still as his voice still was a whisper. Was he afraid of someone listening in? Most likely. A keeper of secrets must realize how secrets are made. "I'm not letting it out to anyone though, just what she means to me. Except to you. You saw my hand on her back, and somehow, you were able to understand, at least to an extent, the feelings I have for Annie. So I'm trusting you now, and telling you this. Was this a positive evaluation of your character, Katniss? Can I trust you?" He asked, already knowing the answer. Bedsheet secrets were told to him, and some already started to involve this girl. He knew a good deal of her before ever even meeting her, and Finnick knew he could trust Katniss with his secret. She looked at him seriously, and nodded, and he nodded in return. "So then, I must extend a warning to you. Don't ever let them know how much a person means to you. Don't ever let them see it. They will use it, and the deeper they can see, the more they will know how to manipulate you. Do you understand?"

His voice was barely audible, but every word pierced her. She nodded, a bit shocked. He continued. "They already know about your sister. You cannot hide her from their view. But you cannot let them know how much of a leverage she really is. If there is anyone around, anyone, that you care for, you need to not ever let them see it. Alright?" She nodded.

He smiled, and sat back and she did as well. It was quiet between them, and Katniss gulped. "Have you always loved her, Finnick?" She asked quietly.

An ocean wave crashing lightly on the sand of home came to his mind. His smile transformed, and she knew this was a true one. This was one that could truly break hearts, but it was the first time she saw it. It was unguarded, involuntary, and whole. "Something in me always did. My brain had to catch up to my heart though. My love came to me in waves, in a tide."

She smiled and nodded at him, even though she didn't know this feeling that he had. She loved only one person, and it was Prim. She loved her the moment she was born, brought her flowers and giggled out her name. Her first memories were her sister's first steps. She always loved her, and always knew. But still, she could understand Finnick's love, and his fear. She was thankful for his warning.

It was silent between them for a while more, and then Finnick broke it again with another question. "What is Peeta to you, Katniss?"

In the context of the conversation they were having, she felt herself still. _What is Peeta to me? My last hope, _she thought._ A smile and a laugh from days when I could smile and laugh too. Hidden cookies in my locker. Eyes that found me in a crowd and looked away when I looked back. Bread warm and burning through my clothes to my skin as I ran through the rain. A boy that reached out to me when I pushed everyone away. A boy that I never said thank you to. What is Peeta to me? Peeta is...Peeta. _She cleared her throat and cleared her head. "A person." Even the word 'friend' felt like too much.

He nodded, and his eyes held their own secrets, and she just wished that she could pry open his mind. He knew something, something more than she did, and she wondered what whispered words told him about her. It wasn't whispered words that he picked up though. It was observation. The fool of a boy looked at her as if he loved her his whole life. She never noticed, but he wondered if she could tell. He wanted to laugh aloud; of course she didn't. Well, it was probably better this way. The chances of both of them surviving were low, even lower being from the unappealing District Twelve. Still, he couldn't help but voice his question to her. "The question I guess then, is: What are you to Peeta?"

He got up with just one more nod at her, and left the room. Katniss sat for a bit longer, her eyes traveling to the dying white roses, and left to get back to the tests.

Later, she found her way to Peeta. "What did Finnick Odair want?" He asked, his eyebrows furrowed.

_He wanted to warn me. He wanted to let me know what he goes through in the Capitol. He wanted someone to know how much he loved a girl whose first Reaping was coming up. He trusted me with secrets, and didn't ask for any in return. Not yet. He doesn't know me but he's worried for me. And he's worried for you. I'm worried, too._

The truth died on her tongue, and Katniss pushed a smile through. She batted her eyelashes, hoping that she could pull off at least just slightly the kind of looks Finnick seemed to be born with. "He offered me a flower and told me he wanted to know my secrets." _He told me his. He told me never to let any of my secrets go. He told me that the Capitol would ring them out of me until I suffocated. He told me that there was a currency underneath the glitz and glamour of the Capitol that was all in secrets. He told me that he had been paid in them for years. He gave me some of his. He told me that he loved Annie, and how it made him scared. He showed me how much of a weakness love seemed to be, and how vulnerable he was to it all. I don't have any secrets though. Do I? Not yet? Yet is a tricky word._

Peeta just laughed though, and she let her own join his. She kept those thoughts, her new wisdom, all to herself._ I have to start carrying my own secrets, _thought Katniss to herself. She had many secrets already, but they were the secrets of a girl who provided for her family and lived in a sooty grime of a hut. Finnick Odair gave her the first secrets of her new life, and she knew they wouldn't be the last.

She thought of his practiced coated smile, and wondered how many fake grimaces it took to perfect it.

* * *

Rue sat next to Katniss for lunch. Katniss felt like_ she _was a little girl again, and almost tried to scamper away from her. Sitting next to her during lunch, talking, even knowing her name, it made everything harder. This was hard enough. Hard enough to deal with the Capitol and a life of donations. Having to care for others, it made her heart lurch at the thought.

But then Rue smiled, and Katniss couldn't help but smile back just like before and even comb her hand through her hair. She didn't look like Prim at all, a night to Prim's day, but inside her, Rue was the sunshine and love that Katniss only thought existed in her little sister. And she couldn't just leave that smile, she couldn't be cold to this warmth of a life. So she stayed seated by her, and when Peeta joined them the three of them ate and talked. _Fine_, she told herself._ Just these two people then. I don't need to know anyone else's name here_. She looked at the others, a tall blond boy perched laughing near a petite fierce black haired girl, a boy with hair as red as the blood that ran through him (as red as the blood that the Capitol would drain of him). More faces, more names, more laughter, more smiles. Katniss felt surrounded by the life around her, and felt as if she could hear everyone's heartbeat at that moment, beating loud and hard to make sure the world knew they were alive.

Katniss turned away from them, blocked the sound out (_it was only in my mind, that wasn't real_), and focused back on Peeta and Rue. Johanna's words came to mind. They all were just corpses, the bodies around her. These two were the only others alive.

* * *

There was someone sitting, perched high above them every day that watched as they went through their stamina work. He never talked, he sat quietly and observed. Sometimes others were with him, sometimes he was up there alone. They all had the white coats that promised of Doctor, along with the Capitol flair all amongst it.

He was in charge though. His esteem, palpable even from below seemed to say so. He was Head Doctor, and he watched, at times stroking his finely trimmed and manicured beard, the Reaped to make sure they were all fit. He didn't have to watch, but he liked to. He liked to know what everyone's strengths and weaknesses were. He liked to be able to make his own list of the Reaped and who he wanted to survive, and who should give a big donation right off the back.

A couple days in, he broke his silence and addressed everyone before they started their stamina checks. "My name is Seneca Crane, and I am the Head Doctor here. I have the final say on what your donations will be, which is just in a couple of days times."

Silence pervaded through the air, and he stood up from his seat and looked down at them. He even fought back a smile. This was power, and it felt good coursing through him. He knew he'd eat and sleep well tonight, and maybe he'd call upon the company of someone or another. He would say he was lucky, but he wasn't. Luck wasn't it at all. He deserved everything he had. And what he had was this. The one (or several, during emergencies) week a year where every decision came down to him. "Many of you will die," He said, his voice loud. He watched to see who stilled at the words and fought another smile. He wondered fleetingly about how it'd feel to stand down there, to be looking up upon a man that told him that he may die. "It's a demanding year, more demanding than the past couple." He let the smile finally come through as he sat back down in his chair, a glass of wine waiting for him. "Do be sure to try your best at making an impression."

He swished the red around in its glass before taking a sip, and took note of which of the Reaped seemed to try harder during their stamina training. He always loved a good obedient little thing that sparked with a fire under his ass, but the ones that wouldn't try and leap through hoops always were his favorites. His eyes caught that of a girl with steel instead of irises, and although she was getting ready to do a run, her eyes were narrowed in his direction.

He leaned back in his chair and sipped again at the red wine. Yes, he did enjoy the ones that fought. He enjoyed the moment they finally squirmed and complied.

* * *

Her mother stopped moving again for a couple of days. Prim realized that this was the way she'd have to deal with all loss now, not just the loss of her husband. She wondered how her mother would fair something like the loss of a dress, if something so small could cause this deep of an effect with how far she was gone. Prim wondered what her mother would do if she herself left.

Prim murmered a quiet curse under her breath, something she didn't do often (at least definitely not as much as she heard her sister do – _used to do, used to_). She couldn't leave her mother. Katniss knew exactly what she was doing. Prim sighed, and it was heavy, heavier than her own small body, and kissed her mother's cheek as she went to school.

Her mother didn't move, but as the door closed she smiled at the opened window. A bird sang nearby, and if she listened hard enough, she could hear a voice that could stop it.

* * *

Katniss hesitated at the door. She was pretty sure no one ever did this, and she was pretty sure she didn't want to do this. But she had to. She had to talk. She had to know. Her fists knocked three times unevenly, and she listened to what was happening behind the oak. She thought she heard a choked sob, and she wanted to run. But she couldn't. Her feet were planted. And soon enough, the door swung open, and a tired Effie stood in front of her.

They both took in each other in surprise. Effie's wig was still on, albeit a bit askew. Her make up was mostly rubbed off though, and Katniss could see the Seam that the Capitol tried to hide. She wanted to put her hand up to Effie's, compare their skin tones, see if maybe the make-up by this point somehow soaked through into her natural coloring. Effie tried to think of the last time one of the Reaped willingly seeked her out. Once, it happened only once, and that was a long long time ago and _stop thinking about that right now_. She composed herself, and smiled. This couldn't go as bad as that one, she'd be fine. "Katniss! What a surprise!" Even she could hear the fake ting in her voice.

"Can I come in?" Katniss asked, and Effie nodded and they walked into her room and closed the door. Katniss looked around a bit, and then finally ended up sitting on a chair in her room. Effie sat across from her, fidgeting a little bit. It always hurt more when one of the Reaped was from the Seam (_they almost always were from the Seam – that was never lost on her_). She looked at them and could see herself in their space, just as frightened and mortal. She knew their names, their eyes and what the did. That hurt. That made her smile wider and talk more shrill. That made her practiced Capitol accent come out better, and sound as if she never spoke with any other twang to her voice. Katniss stared at her, or rather stared at where her wig was offset. Just a slight bit of her real hair came through, and Katniss could not concentrate on anything else. "Effie. Would you mind taking off your wig?" She asked, quietly.

Effie stilled her fidgeting. No one has seen her without her wig since she became the District Caretaker _not even..._ She shook her head from that thought, and her hands went up to the clump of pink upon her head. She hated it. She hated it so much and she hated her job and being painted up and her name she hated her goddamn name and she hated it all.

In one motion, she took the wig off and her hair came down.

It was long and straight; Katniss could tell that even though it was done up in a wig every day that she took care of it rigorously, the shine from time spent upon it. It was a dark brown with hints of honey, and Katniss could almost imagine the honey taking it all over during hot summer days in Twelve. Effie stood up and used a washcloth to get the rest of her make up off, and Katniss felt stilled. She was a real human being, a girl from the Seam. A girl who volunteered. A girl who got caught up in the Capitol and could do nothing but comply. It felt a bit hard for either to breathe.

"Ephie..." Katniss whispered, and she tried to put an inflection upon it to have her know that she was speaking to Ephie from the Seam, not Effie the Capitol District Caretaker. She understood though.

"It's been over twenty years since anyone has seen the Seam within me." Katniss tried to think of how old she really was, and couldn't put a number to it. In the Capitol hair and make up she was but a porcelain doll, and just like one there was never an age that could be placed upon her. Her skin underneath held a sick pale tone to the dark Seam, most likely from the lack of direct sunlight. Her face had no wrinkles, another thing to thank the Capitol for, for sure. Katniss wondered if there was anyone back at twelve who knew Ephie, but shook that away. There was no one left to ask about that, only Haymitch, and he was always stuck drunk in a bottle. "It's been over twenty years since I became Effie, District Twelve Caretaker. It'd be the same, they told me," Her voice was blank, but Katniss looked at her and saw the tears in her eyes. "'We're just changing the inside but leaving the outside alone.' I'd keep the same sound of my name, it'd just be spelled differently on important papers I'd have to sign or any of the other times that I'd have my name in print. So they changed my name. And then they changed my outsides." Her eyes flashed to Katniss. "I'm afraid of how much my insides have been changed to. I know they are. I can't deny it, not like I used to in the beginning."

She was staring at the face of the reason why she volunteered, Katniss realized. The hint of honey within her hair changed for the briefest of moments in Katniss' eyes to stark blonde, and she saw the pools of sadness in her sisters blue eyes. Katniss whispered, and tried to fight her own tears. "I volunteered because of my sister. She wanted to volunteer, to become a caretaker. I can't let them take her." Her voice was becoming hoarse, and the urgency could be felt. She thought briefly how these rooms were most likely bugged, but she didn't care. Let the Capitol know how much she hated what they did to them all. "I'm not good at caretaking, so I volunteered for this, for the Reaping. Only one person per family is allowed per year. I bought her another year, to realize that she's needed there. I can't let them take her."

If anyone could understand this all, it'd be her. And Effie – Ephie, for now though – nodded. "And don't let them. If you aren't able to tell her this next year because–" she didn't finish that thought, but she didn't have to. They both understood. Katniss could very well not be alive to fully explain her reasonings to her sister. "There's not much I can do, but I'll try and keep your sister safe."

There was silence, and tension. And then Effie picked up her wig again and put it on. Fake smile, and Ephie was forgotten yet again. "If you'll excuse me, Katniss. I'm just tired. Tomorrow is a big big big day, afterall."

* * *

And even though she saw him all the time, haunted in the days by what he became and what he is, what he was and used to be haunts her dreams. It's a locked door that stands between them and she refused to open it. It's a locked door that stands between them and he pounded his fist, pounded against it until his fists were bloody, pounded against it until he knows there will be bruises. The doctors would ask about them tomorrow, would make him go through even more testing to check to make sure he wasn't bruising irregularly, but that wasn't on his mind, there's just the locked door and her, _her_, that exists at this moment.

And then the knocking stopped, but the locked door was still there, and she knows that he was still there too. "Why?" His voice comes out in a snarl, in a cry, in a whisper, in a sob. "Ephie, Why? Why? _Why_?"

She couldn't answer that question though. If he needed to ask it she couldn't answer. So she stared at the locked door and it stayed locked, and the bloody and bruised knocking started again.

* * *

Katniss was late to breakfast the next morning. She didn't want to be alone with Peeta and his questions. She didn't want to be alone with Haymitch and his scowls and stale breath. But most of all she didn't want to be (couldn't be) alone with Effie. She got to the table as they all were nearing the end of the first plate and Katniss just nodded as she shoveled who knows what on hers. Peeta raised his eyebrows in questioning.

"You're late," Haymitch growled, taking a gulp of black coffee.

"And you're hungover," Katniss retorted, and Haymitch barked a quick laugh and went back to eating.

* * *

Every morning after breakfast, Katniss got pushed down the hallways and sat on a white bed surrounded by white curtains in a white room and everything around her is bleached and sterile and so goddamn white. She never thought she'd miss the colorful and clashing Capitol trends, but she did in these rooms as they took blood samples and made sure that everything in her was okay.

"How long is this going to take today?" She asked the nurse that put her in a gown. The nurse looked at her with her eyes set wide, but didn't say anything._ Did she not hear me? Or did she just refuse to answer. _Anger threatened to prickle in Katniss when another nurse came behind the curtain and helped.

"It'll be the same as always, Miss. Just a couple hours and then you can go to lunch." Katniss sighed. Lunch, and then she'd have to be with all the others that were Reaped and they'd all do stamina work.

The first nurse, the silent one, nodded to the other and left in a hurry. Katniss raised her eyebrows, and voiced her thoughts as they hooked machines up to her to read her heart. "Did I offend her somehow?"

The nurse paused and looked at Katniss, deciding upon whether or not she should tell the truth. "She's an avox nurse."

Avox? Katniss never heard that word before and the confusion showed on her face. The nurse seemed to get flustered and spoke quickly. "Avox nurse. Some used to be citizens that were deemed traitors. Others were nurses already that later on got deemed 'traitor.' Talking too much. Administering medicine that wasn't supposed to be given to the patient. One question too many," Her voice was a rasped and frightened whisper. "They cut out her tongue. Avoxes have their tongues cut and are forced to serve the Reaped."

Katniss stopped asking questions. Would the questions she already ask create another avox? She felt sick to her stomach and if it wasn't for the fact that they were forced to eat during lunch she'd never try to eat another morsel again.

Her dreams that night featured a silent Prim standing over her as she laid on a bed. Katniss couldn't move but she could talk, and she talked to Prim and told her how much she loved and missed her. Prim stayed silent and didn't acknowledge the words, and worked on Katniss like she was anyone else. And her hair was pulled up in a Capitol fashion, and were her nails painted? Prim wouldn't do that, no, she liked them with dirt underneath from picking flowers and finding herbs.

And then Prim opened her mouth, wide, and she was missing a tongue.

* * *

One of the Reaped from District Six bumped into Katniss by accident. She was ready to scowl, to pull herself up and just walk away, but they started to apologize. "I'm sorry," they said, and their hand was out to help her up from the ground. And Katniss' anger turned to fear as she took their hand and when she stood, they didn't let go and started to shake it. It was the girl, and she smiled and introduced herself. Katniss blocked her hearing when she said her name, refused to let herself learn it, and muttered her own name back, a quick _Katnisseverdeen_ (one word, through teeth that barely even moved), so that she could have her hand out of their grasp.

The girl kept talking. Katniss walked away without an explanation. Odds were that one of them at least would be dead by the end of the week. This, Katniss decided, wasn't the time for manners.

* * *

"The one that volunteered," he brought up casually with a pause. He looked at the man before him as he tended to his roses. "She's interesting."

"She's a nuisance," the man regarded quickly, barely even looking up at him.

Seneca's lips quick drew into a thin line. Sure he had power, but being even around this man diminished it to nothing. This was the President afterall, the true last say in all. And there he was, trimming roses. Because he could. Because that's what he did all the time. Looked upon all of Panem, _his_ Panem, and trimmed whatever roses he decided to. "Do you know why I tend these roses so closely?"

Seneca frowned for a second, but then quickly drew his face back to a neutral placement. President Snow still hadn't looked at him, but he knew that a frown shouldn't be on his face. Still, he wanted to speak of the Reaped. Not flowers. "No sir, why?"

He continued working on the flowers, all white, near him. He still didn't look over at Seneca. "These roses are delicate. They grow together, strengthen each other with their own strength. But not all of them can be strong. It happens. Some start to die." His scissors rested nearby a browning rose. He snapped them quick and went to work, the dead rose falling to the ground. "If you don't cut out the rotten flower, it acts as a," he searched for a word, "acts as a_ poison,_ Seneca. A bad rose will turn to rot the nutrients that go to the roses that are nearby. Soon you'll have a whole bundle of roses down, and if you don't take it away they'll consume the entire plant. But with a couple of simple snips, the bad is gone. The living and strong roses have better air circulation, and growth blooming becomes easier." President Snow finished trimming at a dead rose, and turned finally to look at Seneca right in the eye. "Do be sure to cut any roses of yours that seem to have a rotten streak in them, would you?"

It was said in a friendly tone, a passerby could hear this and believe they were really speaking of planting. Seneca strained his neck to nod and the President, satisfied, walked away to more roses to tend to as Seneca Crane took a gulp and walked in the opposite direction. He wasn't a dumb man, couldn't be for making his way to the position that he had. He understood what the president was telling him. In the context of what Seneca was trying to speak about beforehand, he got the message clear. Seneca was to make sure that a certain Reaped wouldn't make it past the first donation.

There were rotten roses to be plucked.

* * *

"You ever think of the last thing people said to you before you left on that train?"

Peeta looked over at Katniss when she said that. She wasn't looking at him, but out the large window in front of them that overlooked the entire Capitol, and her eyes distant. Their interview was tomorrow night, and then donations. Peeta pushed that from his mind. His eyebrows raised and she turned to look at him.

A smile flirted upon her mouth but never quite reached it, and she looked back out towards the window. "The last thing Prim said to me was to smile. I was scowling," Her eyes danced with real happiness for a second at the thought, and Peeta had a small smile form on his lips. Katniss, always scowling. And her sister Prim the only one to get her out of it. "So I smiled for her. My mother informed me we were low on milk. That was the last thing she said to me." She laughed without humor, and her talking became methodical, removed from it all. "Although, I don't know if I can even count that. That was the first time she talked to me in five years. Since..." She shook her head. Since her father died, Peeta understood that's what she meant. "The last thing she said to me before she went off and gave up on everything though. That would be her telling me to make sure to hold Prim's hand while walking to school." Katniss nodded fiercely at this memory. Thinking of how protective Katniss was with Prim over the years, Peeta was sure she took these words to heart more than anything else her mother said to her.

Katniss continued talking. She was never one to talk, never one to open up with feelings, and Peeta stared at her intently as she did so. There was so much he knew about her, and yet every moment he felt surprised by her. Peeta decided it was one of his favorite things about her. "Gale...the last thing Gale said to me." This time her laugh had a real humor to it. Peeta felt his insides darken but he pushed that away. The laugh was an audible reminder that his time was up for the chance at being able to make her smile and laugh. When was the last time she really had, because of him? Probably back when they were five, maybe a bit older. She found where he was most ticklish right away, but it took him a couple of weeks to figure out that she was most ticklish underneath her kneecaps. He wondered, fleetingly, if she still was. "He said I was being stupid. He told me that we should run away, to live in the woods. That we could survive that." She shook her head. "I had Prim...he was being so stupid. And selfish.

"Madge told me good luck, she saw me just before the Reapings. But that doesn't count, that official little send off right before the stage that is our ticking clock. Before that, she said thanks to me for the strawberries I got for her and her family, and then she gave me one of them. We ate in silence, but she got some on her dress, and got upset. She'd have to change before the Reaping. 'I hate when I get strawberry juice on my clothes,' she told me. 'It looks like blood and makes me sick.'" Katniss forced one breath out loudly, as if she was laughing again. They've been pricked and bled a good deal in the past couple of days at the Capitol, would be even more, and the thought of it all being strawberry juices upon them instead of their own blood was something of a dream.

Peeta cleared his throat a bit, but Katniss didn't look over at him. Her eyes were still out towards the Capitol as the sun threatened to fall beneath the buildings and escape the world for the evening. Her mind was back at home.

_Home_. The word hit Peeta like a scalpel, and he didn't care to think of how soon a scalpel would actually hit him. He tried to think of his family, his friends, final words that he heard them say. "I can't remember the last thing anyone said to me before I got on the train." Katniss turned her head to him then, and it was his turn to stare out the window, to look at the Capitol without seeing. "I was helping in the bakery before Reaping, so I guess it was some order, or another. I'm sure if my dad knew...If he knew he would've said something maybe. Or," Peeta found himself at a loss for words, something that didn't usually happen to him. He looked in the reflection of the window, to the girl sitting next to him that looked his way. He thought of all the times he looked at her, all the times she refused to meet his eyes, but he couldn't bring himself to look at her right then. Not straight at her. He saw her through the reflection, through a window reflection with the Capitol's buildings and luxury taking away the clarity of her in the reflection.

He shook his head and willed himself to finally look at her again, trying to pull a smile on. "I can't say I ever really thought on it all. The last thing people said to me."

And she remembered how many people always seemed to be around this boy at school, and how she just floated on her own. How words were always easy for him and for others to give him, and for her a conversation always seemed tooth and nail. And maybe that's why it means something so much more. Because there weren't that many people in her life really, but those that were there mattered and cared.

She remembered the last thing he said to her before the train too. (The last thing she let him say to her, before all of this.) He told her that she didn't have to be alone.

* * *

With death so close, her mind went to her father. She felt guilty for that, guilty that he was strongest in her mind when her mortality was in question. She thought about him every day though, truly did, missed him with every part of her, but he couldn't seem to leave her mind.

When she'd think about her father, it'd be his song and smiles. Nowdays though, it wasn't so. She wondered about his final moments.

She wondered, did the flames come and take him away? Or was he there for the first explosion, blown apart by it? Or maybe it was a slow death of suffocation, of the earth burying him in his grave, the air slowly leaving him gone, no light to be seen again?

What would be worst? And how did it feel? If she was put on that table, and died, would it feel similar? Would it feel worse? Would she wake up just to feel the pain of dying, or would it just pass through? Fire explosions, soot and earth filled her mind, was what she thought of with the possibility of death of sterile knives and up-to-date machines and blood blood blood. Red. It always came back to red. Red of the fire or red of the blood that ran through her, that the Capitol would run her dry of. Red was the true color of it all, the true color of Panem. She hated it.

She always had nightmares, of the final moments of her father. They were only worse in this place, and she wondered if when she was put under, when they were picking through her insides for something to use, if she'd have the soot in her lungs of a nightmare.

* * *

"Alright," Haymitch said, trying to get into the role he had to be in. The mentoring role. It was stupid, and a waste of time, but at least he could use it as an excuse to skip out on some of the tests himself. He just needed to help guide them slightly, push them a bit to be able to be seen in a decent enough light to be able to survive. It never worked. Haymitch would blame himself (did blame himself, really), but he tried not to think about it too much and instead would reach for another bottle. "Alright, so what angle are we going to do for your interview?" He muttered to himself.

Peeta sat across from him and brought his one foot to sit atop the other leg.

Haymitch looked him up and down, wishing he had some of his liquor right then. It was there in front of him, but he tried to not reach for it. He tried to stay sober for when he had to actually give them advice, actually talk to these soon-to-be-dead, as if he could help them. The interview, it was so close. So close that all he wanted to do was drink. But no. Not yet.

"Nervous?" Haymitch asked with a smirk as Peeta shook his head. But when he looked at the boy, really looked, he really didn't seem nervous.

He just wanted his goddamn liquor.

They talked strategy. He was a good natured person, genuine, sweet. His looks were admirable, which would be helpful. And Haymitch recognized something within this kid that he hadn't seen in a while; the ability to just _talk_. Which sounded a bit stupid maybe, but it was truly a skill. Haymitch allowed himself to think maybe, just maybe, he would get a survivor from District Twelve.

Dangerous thinking. He poured himself his drink finally.

The boy had strengths, yes, but he had weaknesses too. Weaknesses that may be his failure. The boy, Peeta, he already had a plan at what to say during the interview.

"Are you mad, or just plain dumb?" Haymitch asked him, taking a gulp of the burning liquor.

"Could you for one moment just not drink?" Peeta asked, an anger rising in him. Haymitch looked at him curiously, setting his glass down. "No. I'm not mad or dumb. I know what I'm doing."

"You don't know a thing, you're a damn fool." His bitterness was more prominent than Peeta had seen before, and he didn't exactly understand it.

He crossed his arms. "So what if I am? I'm saying it."

There was a pause, until finally Haymitch laughed a bit. "You're as soft as dough."

Peeta looked down. "I'm a baker."

Haymitch barked another laugh, and slapped Peeta on the back. "That you are, boy. That you are." He cheered him with his glass, and took a drink despite Peeta eying the glass. "So you're going to go on to this interview of yours, on National Television, spill your heart out, and then hope they don't end up cutting it out of you."

Peeta shrugged. "Guess so."

Haymitch had to admit, as much of a fool this boy was, he had some sort of bravery in him. Fool's bravery could get him far enough, or could make his short life even shorter. He tried to imagine if all those years ago, if he had this sort of stroke of foolishness, but quickly took that out of his head with another gulp of his liquor.

* * *

Prim sighed as she put away the dishes for dinner. Mother barely ate (always how it was), and Prim had her fill and not another bite (never another bite more).

This was the life that was preserved for her by her sister. This was the life that her sister sacrificed herself for so Prim could still have.

She wanted to throw the plate in her hand at that moment, and maybe even scream. She was always such a good child, innocent and smiles, wasn't she? That's what Katniss longed to protect and save.

She wasn't a child though. No one in Twelve, in any of the Districts, were children anymore. When babies are born, the baby cries but the mother cries harder. When babies are born, they are mere children until the ability of memory and thought come through. And then they become old, tired, and maybe their bones don't crack, maybe their bodies are still young, but their soul, their hearts, they yearn for the days where holding hands in front of someone's eyes made them disappear until someone said "peek-a-boo."

Prim went to bed, tired, and she wondered if tomorrow she'd smile. (She would, she always would, but the night had a way of crashing into her.)

* * *

Nerves were an understatement. As Katniss stood behind the stage, she tried to make it so she wouldn't shake. She was glad they hadn't given food this whole day, for she surely would have emptied her stomach of it all.

She adjusted her dress, feeling uncomfortable in it all. She spent several hours with Effie walking around in heels to get used to them, but she was still not completely confident (or at all) about her ability to not trip and make a real mess of an impression. _Maybe they'd find that endearing, a tripping ditzy girl, _Katniss thought to herself. _Haymitch made it obvious that nothing else about me was endearing._

Her prep time strategizing with Haymitch was an absolute waste of time and failure. Every single approach he shot down. He ended up drowning himself in his liquor halfway through, and it became a faceoff of sneers and sly remarks between the two of them. "Just be yourself sweetheart. I'm sure someone out there would want someone as charming as you to stay alive," Haymitch told her as she left with two more hours she was supposed to use being coached by him.

_Some mentor,_ she thought to herself, fidgeting in her dress. _Some drunken fool that's less charming than me and still alive_.

So she wasn't the most charming girl around. She didn't expect to be, she never was. But she thought to her stylist, Cinna. She only met him briefly, was promised to be more acquainted with her if she was able to make it past this first donation (_You live, and you'll be some sort of celebrity, Katniss. Celebrities needs stylists_). He was a relief, a man of the Capitol but the only piece of him that seemed to be Capitol was the gold eyeliner of his. He didn't seem to have any alterations of him, and she felt like she met someone who wasn't a piece of someone else that was in her position. That was a bit easier to deal with. And Cinna _was_ easy to deal with. He was nice. And he understood. And he called her strong.

That helped. She wasn't feeling very strong right then, sitting in that stupid dress and stupid heels, waiting to go on stage in front of the world and convince them all her life was worth it. She felt anything but strong, really. Earlier in the day she wondered if she should just blow it, because really, what did it matter? But she had to try. Prim, Prim would be at home, watching the interview. She'd know if Katniss gave up. Katniss couldn't give up, if not for anything else but Prim.

Peeta smiled at her, trying to reassure, but she could only manage an attempt at moving the muscles of her mouth before she turned to look in front of her. She fought a nervous anger down. She asked Haymitch what Peeta's approach was, and the old man just barked out a laugh. "Ask him yourself sweetheart. Better yet, just sit and wait for it all."

It didn't matter what his strategy was. Peeta was nice, charming, attractive, and likable. Peeta was just..._Peeta_. He could go out there and howl, and they'd all probably still love him.

Katniss on the other hand, there was nothing she could do to capture them. The term "dead man walking" came to her mind, and she wondered what a dead man would say as well because dammit she had to go up there soon in front of a crowd and cameras.

And then her name was called with a roar of a crowd beckoning her. She gulped, standing up, and went to walk on stage. "Katniss," Peeta called to her, his hand caught her wrist, and she stopped to look at him. He was in a suit, trimmed red to match her red dress. He pulled it off well, and she only hoped that she wouldn't trip out of the dress on stage. "Good luck. You'll do great," He finally said after a pause, and then let his hand fall. She smiled at him, more at the thought of how what he said was a joke, and made her way to sit with Caesar.

The interview was fine enough. Banter that was started and really supported by Caesar which had the entire crowd laughing. He complimented her dress, and she complimented Cinna, and Caesar said how he hoped she'd stick around so he could see what else Cinna would make for her. She laughed at that, tried to bite back her thoughts of how all she was to them was a girl in a pretty dress, how all they wanted was someone to twirl in a new fashion. _It was fine_, she told herself._ Just let it be. If it could save my life, let it be. _

And then the question. "Now Katniss. Everyone was quite surprised when you volunteered. Would you care to talk to us about that?"

Finnick came through in her mind. His words had been playing in her mind since he said them._ I must extend a warning to you. Don't ever let them know how much a person means to you. Don't ever let them see it. They will use it, and the deeper they can see, the more they will know how to manipulate you. _What is it that she could say? She just wanted to see the Capitol, and maybe give them a ditzy smile? No, that wouldn't work. She wasn't a good liar and the hatred she had for this place would probably ooze out from in between her teeth. They'll use it, he said. But what was the point of hiding it all, really? Everyone knew all the rooms here were bugged. Conversations in secret weren't actually in secret. They knew at least a piece of her, of Katniss, knew the truth. At least the Doctors did, or whoever was listening in and watching the cameras. So what if all of Panem knew? She didn't like the idea of it. She didn't want them to take pieces of her that couldn't be taken out with a knife. But they already knew. They already could use it against her. So why not let everyone know as well?

"My little sister," Katniss started hesitantly, looking at Caesar. She couldn't say everything, but she had to say something. "She has so much potential and so many ambitions," _Too many ambitions_, she added in her mind. _Ambitions that'll destroy her and I cannot let that happen_. "She deserves the world. But we never had money, really. I couldn't give her the life I wanted to. But if I volunteered, if I donated and lived through it and had money," She was realizing just then as she spoke that maybe this was something that she could do. "If I live, I want to be able to send money to my sister. I want her to live well. She deserves it more than anyone else I have ever known." The talk of the amount of money that the Reaped that lived through their operations was always there. _Would they even let me do that? _She asked herself._ Would they let me send money home, or am I to be a foolish selfish girl, spending it on whatever the latest trend was?_

"She must mean a lot to you if you're willing to do this for her with the chances of not seeing her again."

She looked at Caesar, wanted to say how she was the only person she was certain she loved, but faltered. That wouldn't be good, no, because talk of her family would definitely then come up. _And I'm not ready to give them that. No_. She could take the world knowing of the goodness that Prim was. Prim deserved to be known by everyone for how great of a girl she was, how great of a woman she would become. But her dead mother that isn't dead, her dead father who buried her own heart with him, she couldn't give them that. It still hurt. Prim, she could make Katniss smile, and it hurt now, her love for her little sister, how far away she was now from it, but bringing up her parents would make her cry. And she would not wilt for them, would not give them all a part of herself that she could never take back.

So Katniss just nodded. "I love her deeply," Katniss said strongly, and there was no way one could even question it.

"So it was all your sister and your love for her? That drove you to volunteer?"

"No," Katniss said without realizing it. _Shit, _she thought, and inside she panicked. Caesar looked at her surprised._ Shit, shit, shit._ How was she supposed to roll with this? "It was the main reason, but no. Not all of it." _Shit, shit, shit._

"Oh? Well then please tell us what else drove you to volunteer," Caesar pressed, sitting forward even, waiting for her answer.

The buzzer sounded just then, and it took everything within Katniss to not run off the stage and out of the building and just keep running until her lungs collapsed. Instead she smiled at him, at the crowd that let out a disapproving sound at the buzzer. "It seems I'm out of time," She said, relieved.

"Just give it to us quick, Katniss. I'm sure no one would mind a minute more of you," Caesar said, standing up. She followed suit, and he took her hands in his.

_Because I need to say thank you after all this time to the boy that was Reaped_, she thought to herself. _Because he saved my life and my sister's all those years ago, and so to say thank you I had to go where I'd probably lose my life. Because even after all this time in the Capitol I still hadn't told him thank you. Because of burnt bread and dandelions that you can eat or just look at for hope, because of him, because of Peeta._

She didn't need Finnick's warnings to know that that was too much to give them. So she just smiled at Caesar. "Well I just have some unfinished business, Caesar. That's all."

The crowd groaned, pleading for more from this suddenly aloof girl. Caesar wanted it too, wanted whatever her unfinished business was. He thanked her then with a smile, "I really do hope that we meet again and we can know of your unfinished business, Katniss Everdeen."

When she turned to walk away off the stage, her smile turned into a grimace. _Shit, shit, shit._ Unfinished business. That was better than saying 'I just need to thank the boy that was Reaped,' surely, for that would lead to questions of why it was so important, why put your life at risk for just a thank you, but this wasn't that much better of an answer. Unfinished business. Now she didn't know if she wanted to survive, if she wanted to deal with living if all the Capitol was set on doing was to prod her brain and everything about her.

As she passed Peeta, she tried to find a smile for him to wish him luck. His hand brushed hers, brushed hers like it did during their first reaping, and she found the smile easier. Her fingers pressed into his hand, and she looked over at him, the two of them at a slight pause behind the curtain before he went out. She would have said good luck maybe, or something, but the mics were still on them and she was sure that her own contact, her fingers pressed to him, would say what she couldn't. He had a smile, his ears seemed a bit red (or maybe that was the red curtain somehow reflecting off of him in the light), and then he stepped away from her and onto the stage herself.

Haymitch clapped her back and squeezed her shoulder. "Congratulations sweetheart. Didn't know you had it in you to make people intrigued by you." It was as close to a compliment she would get from him. "Don't know if it was enough, but it was good." She nodded, her nerves that strung through her finally starting to dissolve. Not all of them though. She looked up at the screen, where a close up of Peeta sitting down across from Caesar was shown. Not all of her nerves left her, which she couldn't understand. His interview would be fine, he would do fine, but she still couldn't shake it all off of herself for some reason. She chalked it up to the fact that she almost told the entire country that she still hadn't thanked this boy for saving his life all that time ago. That was all.

That wasn't all.

* * *

Nervous didn't even begin to describe how he felt. _Breathe, Peeta Mellark. Breathe_.

Everything was hanging on this night. Absolutely everything. Tonight, it'd be decided whether there was something about him that the Capitol would want to keep, or if he'd be better as just a dead body full of parts to use. As if that wasn't terrifying enough, he was using the night to confess his feelings for a girl who hadn't talked to him in years.

It felt almost as if his entire life built up to this moment, this evening. And soon he'd be up there, telling the world everything. Giving his heart before they could rip it out of him.

He bent down to retie his shoelaces. Double knots, first the left foot and then the right. _Breathe, Mellark_.

She was on stage at that point and he watched. Her smiles were hesitant as well as her words, but she still seemed radiant to him. Haymitch was wrong and being just plain rude when he said that Katniss had no charm or people skills. Sure she was...harder than most. But he tried to think back to the other interviews, to people who tried to put themselves out there as sexual or intimidating or ditzy. Nothing lasted. Katniss lasted. Katniss was a roaring flame with embers that stayed, burning and warm even when the flames were gone.

So maybe he was a little biased.

Of course she talked about her sister. Everything in Katniss' life was for her little sister, and probably always would be. Even when she was younger, even before she lost her father and even her mother (_as good as lost_, Katniss said once), her little sister was important. Peeta remembered how sometimes he was so jealous of Katniss for that, of the love she bore for her family and the love they returned to her. He may have been better off being a Merchant, but there wasn't much warmth within the house that he lived in besides the ovens in the bakery. He loved his family because he had to, but he wasn't sure most days if they even returned that required love to him. So he instead lived on the love for others, love for friends and love for baking and love wherever he could find it. He lived on his love for Katniss.

He reached out for her hand as reassurance when she was done and walking away from the stage. He didn't know why exactly, but he just felt like he needed to. She already went. But he needed to. Like how he'd sometimes do during the Reapings. It almost was an unconscious reaction to walking past her. She didn't draw away from him either. She paused with him, and even went to press her fingers upon his hand and give him a smile.

That was all he needed. He stepped out on stage, and the smile he wore was real.

* * *

"Little duck your tail is out." Prim was ahead of her, skipping, wanting to go and see what was out front in the bakery window. She stopped and turned to her sister and Katniss reached behind and tucked in her shirt.

"Quack quack," Prim said and giggled, and Katniss even went as far to smile down at her little sister and let a "quack" out back.

She remembered a name she had from her childhood from her parents. Little bird. She'd laugh and chirp, and sometimes even flap her arms as if they were wings.

A mockingjay flew past, singing a song of some other person that wasn't her. It had been a long time since a mockingjay sang a song of Katniss'. It had been a long time since Katniss sang. It had been a long time since she had been a bird.

No wings, no feathers, no songs. A cage was still there though, the cage of the District, of the Seam. A cage of the Capitol.

She sighed and forced a smile to stay on her lips as her sister dragged her to the window front to see the cakes. One of them had pink primroses around the border, and her little sister nearly screamed with excitement.

* * *

"I'm kind of nervous, if I'm going to be honest," Peeta told Caesar, and Caesar gave him a nod and a slap on the back.

"I understand, Peeta. Everyone is. That's perfectly fine." Katniss stood behind the stage and watched from a screen and wanted to spit in his face. _You don't understand_, she wanted to scream at him. _You couldn't, you grew up in the Capitol._ She thought sickeningly about all surgeries they went through in the Capitol that weren't necessary for health. The surgeries for appearances, to make one look younger, and more desirable. She stared at Caesar Flickerman, and wondered if he ever got that kind of surgery. If you wanted a new mouth, could you get one off of one of the Reaped that didn't make it through their donation? She shuddered at the thought of how the Capitol all were just a ragdoll sewn together hunk of wealth.

"Well...I'm more nervous about what they take of me." He glanced back quickly, and then to Caesar again. "You know?"

"If it was up to me Peeta, the only thing you'd donate would be your time to spend it with us," He said smiling, and the crowd cheered.

Peeta laughed in response, and waved his arm. "If only it were that simple. The thing is, I'm afraid of what'll happen if they take something like my heart." The crowd grew silent. Caesar's eyes flicked towards the timer above the cameras, telling him they still had over a minute. He didn't know where this was going, the Reaped never spoke about this. This was, in short, off limits. Katniss wondered fleetingly whether Peeta Mellark had a death wish and was giving them all just some suggestions. "Caesar, if you hold something deep within your heart, and your heart is what you donate, does the person that gets it carry that with them?"

"I–I," Caesar stammered. The timer didn't even matter anymore. This was going to go on until Peeta had his say, the buzzer would sound after he said his piece. No one has ever made Casear Flickerman stammer, or get under his composed face. Within a sentence, Peeta did. Katniss was impressed with his way of words, and cursed how she seemed to mumble through her own interview.

Peeta shook his head. "I rather hope not. I can't imagine the burden it'd be for a stranger to be in love with a girl that volunteered to donate from District Twelve."

* * *

He shut the television off with a thrown arm and was out of the house. He should have listened to his own advice and not watch the goddamn program. But it was too much, it was too enticing. He could see her one more time. It wouldn't just be a memory where her face was fading and it wouldn't be a photograph where she just stayed still, but her, actually her. And she twirled and laughed and smiled and spoke, but did he even notice all of that? He wasn't sure. All he was able to take in was her and the fact that she was alive at that moment. He smiled at the television when she was there upon it, and he was happy his family wasn't around for the evening.

It may have had something to do with the way Katniss' eyes moved quick and caught his as they walked past one another, and how he inched his arm just ever so slightly to touch hers as he passed and to squeeze it for a second. He had to watch.

He watched as that slimy blond asshole confessed his love for her.

The television was off and Gale was out his door and running before Caesar could get more out of him about it. Gale hoped that he _would_ have to give a heart transplant, give someone else who'd never be so stupid to voice their dangerous thoughts aloud that organ to pump their blood instead of his. Tomorrow he'd be under the knife. Gale wondered if Mellark's heart would stop beating. This time tomorrow he could be dead. He would probably be dead. It'd be best if he was dead.

It didn't matter though, did it? The amount of rants that he heard of Katniss of her inability or want of love or anything dominated most of his thoughts always. She'd not feel the same way, at least simply because she wouldn't allow it. Or would that even matter? She had the same possibility of death the next day. She could be dead too. Would that make her more vulnerable to his heart, to her own, to his hands and fingers and eyes and lips? Gale didn't know the answer, and his feet tried to outrun his heart pumping blood like wildfire through him. Because it could. Because he wasn't going to die the next day.

When he got to her yard, he went to pick up a rock to throw at her window. He saw that she had it open though; she knew that he'd give in and watch and have to come here then. And so he climbed through, and she was sitting on the ground, food sprawled out all around her. A plate was in her lap, and she ate greedily and fast, like she'd never eat again.

_Right about now, Katniss' stomach would be churning and rumbling_, he thought to himself as he sat next to Madge without a word between them. _She couldn't eat the whole day, because tomorrow she'd be put on a table to be dissected. She can't eat_, he thought to himself._ But I can_. He piled his plate high with food, not even considering taking in and trying to think of what he really was going to devour. There was sweet and spicy and sour and some was hot and some was cold and some tasted so horrible eating together that a glass of water nearby seemed like an answered prayer.

Worrying about a dead girl was tiring. Worrying about a stupid dead boy in love with a dead girl was exhausting. He could worry about food though. He could worry easily about the possibility that he could never have enough of it and would rather burst than stop stuffing his face.

But Madge stopped at one point, and he put his plate down too.

"You loved her," She said softly, and turned to him finally. He didn't want to look at her but he did, he did. "You _loved_ her. I'm sorry."

"She's dead already. I already lost her. I don't care. A dead boy can love a dead girl. They're both dead." His voice was deadpanned. It was a lie, a goddamn lie. Katniss was not the only one to lie to herself, and she was onto something with the thought of lying to herself to make it easier. She wasn't dead yet, and neither was the boy. He already lost her, that much was true, but each way he lost her hurt more and more. The food around him seemed to turn to ash, and he wanted to scream until his throat turned raw and bloody. He pushed his thoughts out of his mind, forced them out. "But we're not. We're not fucking dead, you hear me? You are still alive and breathing and I'm still alive and breathing and we'll fucking live for a long time, we'll outlive her. Our death isn't waiting, our death is scared of us. We're alive, we're alive."

And to prove how alive they were, his arms hooked onto her hips, pulling her close, and his lips found hers in a rough sort of way. His were soft and almost boylike, and that alone could have made her laugh. Hers were chapped and bitten, and that alone could have made him laugh. She was surprised at the feeling of his lips upon hers at first, until she really felt them. _I can feel them on mine because I'm alive_, she thought as her hands went into his hair. _I'm alive and he's alive, and we're both alive, and I can feel him, and he's real, and so am I, and there's no other way to know that anyone else is, but who cares?_ Some kisses make minds go blank, and he was hoping this would be the case with this one, but his mind screamed along with hers. _Alive, we're alive goddammit we're alive_. He moved his lips harder against hers, grinding them as if the friction between their mouths could save him from this bullshit. He bit her already bitten lips and she gasped in surprise and he found his tongue pushed up against her teeth. _Alive, alive, _it chanted in her mind as her tongue forced its way past his lips. She tasted blood and she knew it was hers, and she reveled at how it lingered within the taste of his mouth and hers. It was rusted metal and red but most of all it was blood, her blood, and it meant she was alive. She almost wanted him to bite her lip again and draw more, just because she had blood that could be drawn.

And then they let go of each other, panting. Gale wasn't so sure he wanted to catch his breath anytime soon though. He gasped to try and get it, but that meant he was alive. A struggle for breath meant his body was still living and working. He was alive, she was alive, who cared about those dead bodies in the Capitol? Who were they?

Without another word, Gale left through the window to lay alone in his bed on the opposite side of town.

* * *

She registered it in pieces.

First, it was just him. _Peeta. _

Then. _Peeta's in love. _

She took a shaky breath and looked at the screens that held Caesar's and Peeta's image. _Peeta's in love with me_.

The image on the screen suddenly wasn't him then, but her, and she registered how she looked. Shocked, afraid, and blushing. Her blush was strong against her dark skin, as if to remind all of the Capitol that her blood still was pumping. Her eyes were alive and dancing, and yes, there was fear, but as she looked she realized how alive they suddenly seemed to her. It seemed an odd and foreign look on her face and in her eyes, and she tried to think of when she last saw it._ Before the mines probably_, she thought to herself quickly. _Everything was before the mines with me. I could smile and laugh and love and_–

Her thoughts skidded to a stop. No, she didn't mean it, she didn't mean _that _word, in _this_ context. Her eyes were alive and yes, there was a glimmer of a smile upon her face that she hadn't registered before, but she didn't mean the word love. _Love_. No, that was just a leftover idea of what Peeta just said. It felt a bit hard to breathe for her, and her heart was pumping fast and loud in her ears_. It's because I haven't eaten,_ she told herself. Her shakes she decided, was because of hunger too. She hadn't eaten all day.

She was always a liar, and apparently would be so until her last breath. She hadn't eaten all day, that much was true, but even if she could she probably would have barely eaten. Nerves wouldn't hold solids. Besides that, she had eaten much less for a longer stretch of time. Her heart never beat so loud because of that, her hands never shook with such a fervor. It must have been something else, but no, no. She wouldn't think about it, couldn't, because Peeta was still talking to Caesar and the crowd was screaming and cheering. What was going on? She didn't know, she couldn't know, everything was so goddamn loud and the world was spinning and _my god I could die tomorrow_. Too much, it was too much. She had to sit herself down on the couch and her head was in her hands. She tried to keep her mind blank and bring back to herself the thought of dark green trees and rich browns and forest, forest was around her not these bright unnatural colors and people. She wouldn't let herself think of the now, but somehow still, a thought slipped through. _He waited until the eve of death to say this_.

"Come on, sweetheart," A voice reached her eventually along with a hand on her back, and she found herself standing and letting herself be directed by it. She turned and saw Haymitch, looking more sober than she'd ever seen. He was trying to be calm, but she noticed an undercurrent of emotions dwelling far deep within him. She wanted to say anger, but the look on him was to foreign to be something like anger; he wore that like a sweater. No, it was something different that stirred within him, and although it didn't seem to make sense to her, she recognized remorse when she saw it.

She tried to take everyone in around her, tried to look for other familiar faces. A couple of people came through, but she knew none of them. They knew her though and they smiled at her, the girl in love. She volunteered. She volunteered so her sister couldn't and so that she could finally talk to Peeta. She said in her interview, "unfinished business." What a stupid line. What would they take that to mean now? And what _did _she even mean? She was just confused, and tired of it all. If she laid on the table tomorrow and they took something from her that'd stop her heart, she'd be relieved. It'd stop all of this as well. Her head would stop spinning and the tingling in her body would shut down and stop confusing her so goddamn bloody much.

"Did you know he was going to say that?" She asked him as he led her to the elevators. She knew the answer though, he knew. She thought back to when they were prepping for her interview, and how he maneuvered around her question of what Peeta was going to do. His biting laugh. _Bastard_, her mind snarled. She was left in the dark and he made sure of it. She made a fool of herself.

"Yes. And I didn't tell you because if you knew you'd ruin it all. You can't act, we needed your honest reaction to that." He peered at her without turning, and there was a smirk on his face. He didn't seem all that happy though, he seemed upset and selfish. "And you delivered."

His arm was heavy on her suddenly, and she pushed it away. What did she deliver? A blushing stupid girl with a slight smile that ignited on her face? What did she give of herself that night on the cameras? Did the Capitol intend to take every part of her, even the parts that were locked away and seemingly dead for so long? _Of course,_ she realized._ Of course. They can't just take my organs and life, they had to take every bit and piece of myself. _She wondered if they thought she had a soul, and how much they'd pay to take it. She wondered if she thought of herself of having a soul. "Let go of me, you bastard. You're supposed to make sure that we can get through this and survive! Not throw me in front of those goddamn cameras in a spotlight, unaware of everything at all!"

"Would you calm down?" He asked, just as loud. His smile was gone and Katniss was glad of that. They were in the elevator now, and he pressed the emergency stop button between floor five and six. The elevators were too fast and they had too much to say. An alarm sounded, but it didn't matter. "Would you just realized what happened? Peeta just saved his own life, and yours as well with that. You now have a chance at actually surviving tomorrow, do you get that?" His hands were on her shoulders and he shook her a bit.

She wanted to spit in his face. "No, you just shut up for a minute. The Capitol is going to be putting knives in me tomorrow, and you already are allowing them to dissect me like I'm already on that table."

"If Peeta didn't do that, we both know good and well that this would be your last night alive." His voice was a growl, and his fingers flexed as he held her shoulders harder. "What did you give off in your interview? You twirled in your dress. You took Caesar's compliments. You made a chuckle or two escape the audience members. You were so easily forgettable, did you even speak? I remember something about your sister, you added some mystery to yourself, but you, you were just a twirling dead girl, full of such usable parts and organs. And Peeta was memorable. And then his confession made you both the only things that could be remembered of the night. Love, he said he loved you. And just like that you changed from a sack of things to reap to a human girl, an object of affection. Both of you, suddenly now, have souls to them. Don't you realize this? Are you so daft that all of this went past your head?" He broke away from her and reached for his flask in his coat pocket.

She breathed deep and he just shook his head and muttered under his breath as he pressed the button for the elevator to start up again. Something about today would make him drink even harder than usual, she realized. Katniss rolled her shoulders and tried to prepare herself for the rest of the evening. There'd be time tomorrow to worry about dying, but tonight was now, and it scared her. She'd see Peeta. Peeta just confessed his love for her. Peeta just saved both of their lives. She stopped on that thought. "Haymitch?" She asked, and her voice was quiet, much quieter than it had been. He looked over at her, just as surprised at how quiet her voice was. "Did he mean it?"

A stupid question, and she hated that she asked it. His smile was biting, but before he could answer, the elevator door opened on their floor.

Effie ran up to her, her eyes wider than Katniss had ever seen and her voice fizzier than ever. Katniss still couldn't process the world around her and she just looked on. Effie grabbed her hand then, and marched her towards the viewing room; they were required to watch the recap of the interviews. Katniss turned around desperately to Haymitch, and saw he stood there in silence and looked at her, and nodded. _He was going to leave me alone with screaming Effie and Peeta. Peeta_. She gulped loudly and let Effie drag her to the viewing room. She wish she could switch places with Haymitch and down some liquor and forget everything that whistled around her. She understood the old drunk too much, she already realized such, and was almost afraid of what would happen if she did in fact survive tomorrow. It'd be so easy to become just like him, it shook her and she tried again to focus on the world around her.

Effie settled Katniss down on a couch, and she realized that it was right next to Peeta. She hadn't been so close to him since before the interviews, and it suddenly felt too much. Her mind screamed at her how close they were, the distance that lacked between them, the thoughts of closing even the slightest inch between the two of them. _He did it to save us_, she told herself and clasped her hands together in her lap. She felt him looking over at her but she refused to see those damn blue eyes of his. _He did it to save us, to show the Capitol that we were living beings with souls. It was a lie, a lie,_ and even in her head it sounded like pleading.

Katniss was relieved when the television turned on. Effie's nervous jumbled words stopped and Peeta's eyes stayed off of her. She watched intently, more fiercely than anything she ever watched before. She wasn't paying attention to what anyone was saying though. She didn't care if it was selfish, she barely had any time left and she'd let herself be selfish. She needed to watch her interview again, but more importantly, his. She needed to see everything from the viewer's eyes, and needed to hear what was said afterwards.

The camera caught the exchange they had while walking onto the stage: It caught her smile and his hand brushing hers. He's done that so many times, she realized, and as she watched it, it almost felt like she was back to the first reaping day when they were thirteen. _We were supposed to be safe_, she thought angrily. And then, sadness. _And I was supposed to thank him_. She still hadn't. How had she let them get this far into the Reaping and not say thank you? Still. She wanted to scream, but instead focused on the camera picking up Peeta's smile and slight blush as a couple of her fingers caught his hand and squeezed back.

Talk of the showers in the Capitol came about. Peeta told Caesar how he was deemed healthy. Caesar remarked on how he hoped no one tried to take that face of his right off of his skin, and a couple of girls in the audience screamed. Caesar laughed, made a joke about how maybe Peeta would give Finnick a run for his money. Katniss felt her insides flip at that, and without realizing it, pressed her left leg harder upon Peeta's right leg. Peeta looked at their legs with a cocked eyebrow, but didn't say anything. Katniss didn't turn to him, and she tried to continue listening to the interview without letting her mind stew upon Caesar's comment of making Finnick run for his money. Caesar asked Peeta how he felt about the donation tomorrow.

Katniss knew this part. She watched his blush as it spread over him more and more as he continued to talk. She noted how it started in the tops of his ears, and soon it seemed to almost take over his whole body. The words were said. _I rather hope not. I can't imagine the burden it'd be for a stranger to be in love with a girl that volunteered to donate from District Twelve._ The camera cut to Katniss, and she watched how the blush seemed to move through her skin in a similar pattern to Peeta. She watched her own eyes, her own smile, and how her hands shook. She felt herself blush slightly again, as she watched herself, and she cursed herself in her mind. _If Gale saw me like this he'd eat it up and laugh._ And then she realized that he did, all of Panem did. Her mother, Prim. Prim was watching her right at that moment as a boy said he loved her for the entire Nation to hear. She tried to consider how Prim would act, and she knew how her little sister would laugh and smile and dance around her, dance around the two of them. It was almost too much, that false pretense of her sister's happiness, happiness Katniss wouldn't see or hear or anything because an entire world and a half laid between them, that she almost had to excuse herself. She didn't, she couldn't. She had to watch.

She paid attention to the rest of the interview that she missed the first time.

"I'm guessing by the look on her face she didn't know this?" Caesar asked with a chuckle, looking at the screens that showed Katniss' face.

Peeta forced a laugh as well. "No. No, she didn't know until I announced it on live television." He laughed and smiled, but his eyes were worried and trained on the screens on the stage that still showed Katniss' face. He studied her face on the stage, and he studied it sitting on the couch, right next to her,_ her_ leg pressed against _his_, _touching her_, and he let himself believe, for a short vulnerable moment, that she could love him too.

Caesar laughed again, relieved with how the interview was going, collecting himself back together after his stammers. "Well if you can't say that you love someone on National television, you can't say it at all, right?" The crowd is still cheering and laughing, and now agreeing. Peeta couldn't turn and even look at Katniss, and he couldn't believe he actually went through with it. He's lived with loving this girl for so long from afar, and now he was sitting next to her, watching as he told all of Panem that he did.

Peeta of District Twelve came a long way to the Capitol. And yeah, so maybe he'd die, die tomorrow on a cold slab of metal as if he wasn't even a human being, but at least he could die a little braver.

But he couldn't turn to her. He couldn't look at her face at that moment because_ god she must think I'm a creep or a nut and she'll probably slap me soon or push me into a wall and punch me._ He thought of how Gale would react to this, and he thought for a sick second that maybe it wasn't too bad that they would never get a life back in Twelve. He couldn't see that her eyebrows were furrowed in concentration, that her mind was running a million miles per minute, that her fingers fidgeted as they clasped one another in her lap. He could see her knee, could see how it was pushed right against his, and_ well, at least she's not throwing herself to the other side of the room from me._

* * *

The interview ends with the buzzer going off and Caesar telling Peeta that he hopes to see him after tomorrow, him with Katniss, and the national anthem and seal of Panem comes up. The three of them let the song play through, and then the television shuts off. Silence and electric current seems to surge through the room, and Effie is suddenly standing.

"I'm proud of both of you, your interviews were great." She was rambling, she was pacing, she needed to get out of the room. "Well tomorrow is going to be a long long day, and we all need our sleep. I'll be going now. I'll see you in the morning. Yes. Okay." Her heels tapped out of the room. She was jittery. They thought maybe she felt uncomfortable, maybe she wanted to leave to give them alone time, but that was just a small piece. She couldn't stand sitting there through it all, if she was being completely honest with herself. It was too much, it was always too much, but this time it was even worse. The moment she got into her room she threw off her wig, undressed, and wiped her makeup off on her Capitol dress of the evening. No, these ones were different from the others.

It hurt every year. Every damn year. Time didn't heal wounds, it created more. And they all had names, and she knew every one of them.

She never knew what to expect when she first looked at whoever was reaped, but she never expected this from these two. She stepped into the shower and made the water as hot as she could take it, hotter than any of the water in District Twelve would ever get, even after all these years she knew this.

If these two died it wouldn't just create more wounds, but completely open up old dead ones. She needed to get out of that room, right then, because of their eyes, because of _them_. It hurt every year. Effie would draw farther away from Ephie to deal with it, to be able to get through each day. The more it hurt, the harder she'd smile, the more native of the Capitol she sounded, the heavier the make up was powdered on.

It was their eyes, mainly, and at different times. Katniss' eyes when she volunteered almost made Effie scream and throw her off the stage. There was once a girl, long ago, who volunteered to protect someone as well. Ephie then, she volunteered for caretaking, and although it wasn't something she ever really did, she wanted to take care of _him_. He was Reaped, and what else was she to do? Watch him as he became a shell of a being? Watch him _die_? (That's exactly what she did, but in a way she never thought.) So she volunteered. And somehow the Capitol knew, even though she never said a word. They always knew. And her first year in the Capitol nursing they sent her to help the Reaped of District Three.

It was his eyes during the interview, and afterwards, watching them again. She saw the fear, but also the bravery and the acknowledgement that tomorrow he might be dead. The fear, she knew, she knew too well, was because he loved. Who could have the feeling of love though, without it being intwined like a serpent with fear? (Love sat in a snake pit, waiting to be devoured by fear. Fear was hungry, fear was famished, and fear was a glutton.) It was a foolish fear, but it was there (it was always there, it had to be), but she still woke up in the middle of the night from it and she hated it. The night, cold and lonely and strong, too strong, knew her as Ephie, and Ephie held the same fear to this day that she saw in his eyes.

She never wanted to get out of the shower. She never wanted to lay in her bed and have her dreams take over and she never wanted to have to get dressed in those damn stupid Capitol clothes again. She by accident pulled a chunk of her hair out while shampooing a bit too fiercely, or maybe it wasn't an accident. She couldn't even tell anymore. It didn't matter though, no one else would see it. But she'd know.

In her dream that night, she was back in the past. And during his interview he said the words that Peeta said. And she smiled, and blushed, and who knows what's going to happen but they'd be okay. When she woke up vomitting, she wondered if these two could just go and die so they could haunt her with their lives unlived and not her own.

_Unkind_, Ephie thought, but Effie didn't care, couldn't care. She said it before, and she told herself it again as she tried to go back to bed. It's going to be a big big day.

* * *

When Effie left the two of them in the room, they sat in silence still. He was nervous, so goddamn nervous, how could he of not thought through how to deal with this part? Haymitch was a lousy mentor with that, just giving up to laughter and drinking even more when Peeta said that he was going to do this, say this, and it didn't matter if Haymitch thought it was stupid or a bad idea or _really kid? You're really going to put that onto her when you can soon just be a body turning cold?_

So he'd wait for her to do something, anything, and go from that. The ball was in her court.

She didn't move for a bit, and there was silence. She didn't move, her knee still pressed up against his, her entire side pressed onto his. She should move, but she couldn't. There was so much to process and there was so much that had to happen tomorrow and _dammit and damn me, how have I still not thanked him. That'd have to be tonight,_ she realized. She waited until she couldn't wait any longer.

Don't put off today what you can have still on the tip of your tongue as you die tomorrow.

"Peeta," she finally said, and just like that she could move. She moved away a bit, and turned to face him. He turned to face her as well, following her lead.

"Katniss, I–" But Katniss gave him a look that made him stop. She directed her head up, to the ceilings, and hoped he understood. This room was bugged, they're listening, don't say anything you would regret if you make it through tomorrow. He nodded, felt foolish for trying to talk anyway. He had no idea what he was going to say, which wasn't the best approach to this. He'd probably do something stupid like keep saying that he loved her, had since the first day of school, that she sang and the birds stopped, that she was a bird herself. Yes, he decided, it was a good thing he got cut off.

"I wouldn't tell you earlier, when you asked, the whole reason with why I volunteered," She mumbled, thinking back to when he asked her on the train why she did, and looked down at her hands. She was finally going to thank him. She used to wonder if saying 'thank you' to him would make the connection she felt to him sever. Maybe that's why she never did. It didn't matter now though; she knew that. If the Capitol didn't want her, everything could easily be severed from her tomorrow. "And I didn't say everything in my interview."

She was stalling, he realized. Gathering her thoughts? Why now, of all times, was she telling him why she volunteered? He tried to clear his mind and suppressed the feeling of wanting to gulp all the air he could. His mind was being stupid, and foolish, and kept wondering what her 'unfinished business' was. He was afraid she'd close herself off and walk away before explaining it all, leaving him with the nagging thought of those two damn words until his heart flatlined.

She scolded herself, and then came out with it. "I volunteered because Prim was thinking of volunteering to become caretaker. She wanted to do that, and then hopefully become a nurse. I couldn't let them take her. I volunteered, gave her another year to realize that she couldn't do that, couldn't volunteer. I had to." She paused, she took a breath. This moment was five years in the making, and she still wanted to prolong it. _But I can't. Tomorrow is not promised, it's a drunken walk on a tightrope and I or he or both will probably fall over. _"That's why I volunteered, but there was more behind the reasoning too. If I volunteered, I'd finally get to talk to you again."

Her eyes felt like they were cutting into his suddenly, and he looked at her confused. She looked away then, it was too much to look at him, to see his eyes and their blue (eyes that looked at her through the rain, eyes that looked for her when everyone turned away) as she finally said thank you. "You're a good person, Peeta Mellark. Better than I could ever be. And you have been much, much better to me than I have been to you. You reached out for me after my father died. I shut you out. You gave me cookies, I know it was you just like you knew that I would know. No one else could have made them. You gave me bread. That bread saved my family from starving. And all I did was snarl at you, ignore you, drive you away." She forced herself to look up at him, and his expression was unreadable. "I'm sorry for all of that. I'm sorry I hadn't gone to you sooner to say this. But thank you. Thank you for all of that, for things I'll never be able to ever repay."

Silence sat between them for a bit. Her skin was crawling, anticipating the unknown of what happened next. _What came after thank you?_ She never really said thank you, never had anyone to say thank you to. She never would ask for help, and she'd never get it. But he helped her, and finally, she thanked him. Does a 'you're welcome' come next? Does a hug, a pat on the back, an explanation? Do they talk about tomorrow, and the fact that this time the next day they could be dead? Do they talk about tonight, earlier in the evening, what Peeta said on the stage?

What Peeta said though, was "no."

Her eyes widened, the grey crackled, and she felt herself ready to question being told no. No? _All of these years, and after all of that, No_? "What?"

"No. No as in, you don't need to thank me. No, as in I didn't have a choice and had to. And no, mostly, for the fact that I am not going to accept you saying thank you when you're doing it because you think we're out of time because we might die tomorrow. So, no."

Her retort almost slipped out. _You waited until the night before we might die to tell me, the world, everyone, that you're in love with me._ But she didn't, she couldn't, _he was just trying to save us._ "But I've been trying to figure out how to say thank you for over six years. No. You're not just going to say '_no_' to me. You're going to say you're welcome, or that I don't have to say it, or that I'm an idiot Seam kid that you shouldn't have helped and that you're sorry did. Not just 'no.'"

Her anger fumed, and he looked at her in surprise. She almost smiled then, knowing that she won. But Peeta looked her her right in the eye, and said again, "no."

She scowled. "Why can't you just accept my thank you?" She sputtered. No, this was definitely not going how she planned. She was supposed to say thank you, and he was supposed to say you're welcome, and that'd be it. Then again, she was supposed to do this years ago. She was supposed to do this the day after it happened. She realized that she didn't have a right to be angry, that it's been so long and should have realized that he'd not care for some stupid thank you. Thank yous couldn't take away burns or scars. Thank yous couldn't take away the fact that his mother beat him for that. _At least he's away from her in the Capitol._

"I'm surprised you even remember that, to be honest," Peeta said, shrugging and looking away.

"Of course I remember that, Peeta. I think about it all the time. If it wasn't for the bread, me and Prim would've probably ended up in one of the Homes. I–" She stopped herself as he turned to look at her, and realized what she was saying. What, was it her time to pour her heart out to him? This was more than she'd ever want to say to him, or to anyone. She never told Prim or her mother how she got the bread. She never told anyone about how much it meant, how it lead to her realizing she could take care of her family and keep them together. Why couldn't Peeta Mellark just accept the 'thank you?' Why did he have her go off into this spiral, saying things she never wanted to say?

Katniss stood up suddenly and shook her head. "It's getting late. I need to go to bed." His eyes were large, probably from what she stopped herself from saying before, but then he composed himself and gave her a curt nod. She cocked her eyebrow. "Will you let me say 'thank you' afterwards?"

He laughed and smiled as he stood up. "Yeah. Sure, Katniss."

_Did you really mean it? What you said? Was that a way to make the Capitol want us both to survive, or at least one? Or did you really mean it?_ She bit her lip, frustrated at her mind and the thoughts she couldn't stop it from having. She nodded at him. "Fine. Goodnight. See you..." When would they see each other next? "Just, see you."

Katniss walked back to her room and sat on her bed in a huff. _I finally said thank you, and he refused it. When we wake up after donations, I'm going to slap him before I finally get him to accept my thank you. He better not die before I can do that. He can't. _Because that's what mattered, why it mattered if he lived. She needed him to accept her thank you.

No, that wasn't the only reason. Not even close. But that was easiest to deal with.

* * *

A whisper cut out from the shadows as the man stood in front of the chart of names and what donations were happening tomorrow, and he tried to suppress a gulp. "This doesn't change anything," the voice told him, _he_ told him. The smell of roses and blood overcame his senses. "This doesn't change anything at all."

Seneca nodded to the disappearing figure, and tried to keep his breathing even. Of course it changed things, it changed everything. He didn't have a choice, he had to follow the course, and the course was changed.

So he told himself he didn't have a choice, and made the choice to have things changed.

* * *

A loud banging shook her from her almost asleep state, and she shook her head. Someone was at her door. She thought for a second that maybe it was Peeta, but realized it wouldn't be. The knocking was too forced to be him. She approached the door cautiously, and when she opened it she was surprised at her visitor.

"Finnick?" She asked as he stormed past her and she closed the door, turning to him. He was pacing the room. She was confused why he was there, why he came right before she went to bed to talk. He looked around, knowing that the room was bugged, knowing that if someone cared enough (they always do, those bastards) they could hear this conversation, but he didn't care. He couldn't care.

"Are you stupid?" He finally asked her, sitting down on a chair.

She looked at him surprised. "Did you come into my room just to question my intelligence?"

"I told you," He was almost shaking. From nerves, from anger, from just everything that this damned place had done to him. "I told you not to give them anything."

"They already knew about my sister. You said it yourself, Finnick. There were whispers already about her. If I didn't say anything, they would've known it was a lie." She huffed and sat across from him. "You said it yourself. They already know everything. They use everything they can about you."

"So you just handed it to them on a silver platter?" His hands ran through his hair. "That was stupid. That was so _stupid,_ Katniss! And what the hell was the deal with your whole 'unfinished business'?"

"I just...have some," She looked away from him, not wanting to deal with how stupid Finnick thought of her need to tell Peeta thank you, especially after he didn't accept it.

He shook his head. "I don't know what they're going to do to you, Katniss. Or Peeta either. Peeta... him saying that he was in love with you, after you saying you have unfinished business. Do you know what they're saying in the Capitol?"

Her anger flared. This wasn't her _fault_. "No. I don't give a damn."

"Well you should. Because if they care enough you can live and if not you're dead. They're talking about this tragic love story, Katniss. I don't care if that's how it is or not. I don't care if he really is in love with you, or if your unfinished business is him or just you needing to try some Lamb Stew. The fact is that the citizens of the Capitol are coming up with their own story behind it all. "

"So? That means that they're intrigued and maybe want us alive." Her arms were crossed. She didn't want to have to deal with this. She just wanted to lay down in the bed and wait for the sun to rise.

"Maybe. Or maybe they'd think of how much better of a story it'd be if one of the tragic lovers died. What's better, two people happy and in love? Or a man who finally after years of harboring a love for a girl having to live with her dead?"

"That's sick."

"That's the Capitol."

Her anger flared and she stood up, not being able to hold it in anymore. "We're not just _stories_! We're not just some actors in some show of theirs to watch. We're real human beings, and killing us off just for drama? That's. That's," She breathed deep and sat down, her head in her hands.

"They have you already, Katniss. Even if you survive, they have such a tight grip on you." Katniss envied Haymitch for a brief second. How he was able to just walk around drunk and not be bothered. She threw away that thought though, knowing that it couldn't have always been like that. He had to lose so much to finally just be left alone.

His anger didn't make sense though to her. Although it was nice of him, she didn't know him nearly long enough for him to be so worked up over her. She suddenly knew why. "Listen, Finnick. I know you're worried about Annie."

He was quiet and still for a moment. And then, it seemed as if he just sunk through. "I'm terrified," his voice a whisper. "What are they going to do to her?"

"She'll be fine. Her interview went well, and, and she'll be fine." Empty promises of reassurance. Katniss knew she was in no position to truly know how Annie would do, but she couldn't not say that to Finnick. He just looked so broken, and she understood and even forgave his angry outburst of calling her stupid.

"You don't know that." His words were dead and cheap, and fell to the ground.

She couldn't sugarcoat this. "I don't know that. I don't know anything, you said so earlier." She offered him a half smirk when he looked up, and she saw he had a piece of rope in his hand, knotting it. "What are you doing?"

He gave her a smile back that disappeared quick. "Tying knots. It helps clear my mind. Make knots, untie them. Teach yourself new ones. Untie them." He breathed deep. "I'm sorry I called you stupid. You're not stupid you just..." He trailed off and went to tie another knot. "You just don't know what they're like, Katniss. What they can be like. The Capitol."

He stood up and she did as well, and she found that he soon had his arms around her in a hug. She was startled. There have been only a couple of people really that ever tried to even just touch her. She hugged him back, the steel girl that she was back at District 12 slightly broken.

"Good luck tomorrow, Finnick," She told him, although she knew he'd be fine. "To you and Annie both."

He nodded to her, a sadness that he tried to fight off seeming to swim in his eyes to. "Good luck to you too, Katniss. I really hope you make it through. I could use a friend like you," He told her again with a smirk. She smiled and almost went to hug him again but she stopped herself. "To Peeta too. I'd go and tell him how stupid he was, but I don't have time. I have to..." He trailed off and looked down. He looked up quick and smiled at her. "I have an appointment."

Katniss suppressed a shudder. She knew what an appointment meant, especially at this hour. "Visit Annie afterwards," She said to him as he walked away. He nodded, and left her alone in her room then.

Katniss paced a bit, trying to calm her thoughts. She couldn't. She laid down, and tried to calm down. She couldn't. Her mind was racing. Her nerves seemed to want to shake her shoulders. Her mind was racing. Racing. Racing with stupid thoughts, and she really was as stupid as Finnick said she was, wasn't she? _Peeta said he loved me._ She wondered if her mother watched those interviews, if her mother's mother saw them, and what the woman would have to say about it all. She clutched the sheets closer to herself.

Love is mortal, and the survival rate was that of a starving girl in the Seam. Katniss was seventeen years old, and had lived all of those years in the Seam and starving. She thought of her mother's mother, and how foolish she was. A starving girl in the Seam could live long, so long, almost forever. A girl reaped though, she was given a week. She laid in her bed alone and told herself that now was the time to cry. She expected sobs to rake through her, but she only seemed to have the ability to have a couple of tears pass down her cheek silently. Her mother's mother was a fool, her own mother one too, but she was the biggest fool of all. It seemed to be a family trait, and she hoped and prayed that it wouldn't pass to Primrose.

* * *

The night was cold around him and he tried to pull the blankets closer to escape it. Haymitch's words repeated in his head, calling him a fool over and over again. He was, wasn't he? He would always be a fool. Until he stopped breathing, which, if the Capitol didn't like the cards he dealt out, would be relatively soon.

He would always be a fool, and this would always be a game.

A game. That's all this really came down to, didn't it? To the citizens of the Capitol at least. Pick out the pawns from the undesirable districts. Poke them, bleed them, run them through tests. Dress them up and make them put on a little show. And then decide if they move on to the next part or not. When the games really begin.

Peeta turned in his bed, trying to get more comfortable. He smiled a bit. It might have been a game, but he wasn't going to play by their rules. He took over during his interview earlier in the evening. He took it and used it as a way to tell Katniss (and really, well, all of Panem) how he felt. He made Caesar stammer. He didn't have a lot to feel proud of at that moment, but he did feel proud for this. He finally said what seemed to burn through him, after all of these years. It was a great relief.

Not that Katniss even acknowledged it.

He flipped in his bed again, wishing that the huge windows would open for fresh air despite the fact that he was freezing._ She didn't say a thing about it, _he thought to himself. Katniss didn't even bring it up. Just brought up why she truly volunteered, and tried to thank him. _And I didn't accept it. _He couldn't, she was doing it because they were running out of time.

But that's the pot calling the kettle black there. It took him this long to tell her about his feelings. He didn't even say it directly to her, but instead to television.

He sighed. He just really had to hope that they'd survive this. He could accept her thanks, and he could finally pick her brain with what she thought about him coming straight out and saying his feelings for her. He wasn't even hoping for her to love him back. He didn't expect it. But he just needed to know where she stood with this all. What was going on in her mind, that mind so harshly guarded. Why didn't she say anything though? He remembered seeing Haymitch next to her after the interviews, going with her to the elevators. _He had to have said something. The drunk. What did he tell her? Did she panic and he calm her down by saying it was just an angle that I was working? Damn him. Damn him and his liquor, and damn her for all of these years, for being everything I couldn't have. Damn Effie for stuffing us up like dolls and throwing us out to the crowds to play with. Damn me for being a fool, always being a fool. And damn the Capitol. _He felt so tired suddenly_. Damn the Capitol,_ he repeated in his mind.

He would always be a fool, and he was tired of it all. The possibility of it all being done with him tomorrow almost felt like a relief. And that relief made him feel a little sick.

_Don't give up. You don't know what the hell could come about if you make it through, but don't you dare give up. _Giving up wasn't in Peeta's nature. He didn't have much in his life to compare this situation to, but to just lay down and accept that he'd probably die was not something he wanted to do. That was all he had been doing here. He tried to fight it, needed to and wanted to. He couldn't.

He would always be a fool, and he might as well already be dead.

Although, the dead probably slept easier.

* * *

She lost count of the amount of times she watched him die that night. They were horrible dreams (nightmares) that took control of her usual dreams (nightmares) of destroyed mines. Mines seemed so far from her, and they still hurt and she still cried out for her father whenever those images took a hold of her, but there was something about these dreams (nightmares) that hit even more.

Probably because of the very real and close reality of them. In her dreams, Peeta was laid on the metal slabs in front of her. She watched as the Doctors she saw during the past week saw into him. Several times they didn't even gas him, and his screams filled her dreams. (Which was weird to her. When had she heard him screaming? She hadn't, had no memory to pull this from, but the sound pierced into her nonetheless, and each time she woke with her own scream in response and a hammering heart.) Her hands shook, and she didn't try to say it was because she hadn't eaten in a while. They shook because the sun was rising, because she could die, Peeta could die, they could all just die. She screamed because most of her nightmares were just a step away from coming true.

She would admit it to herself, at this point. The harrowing night took away some of her fight. She was afraid. She was afraid for herself, how she willingly gave her life to the hands of the Capitol and it all led up to tomorrow, no, today now, just a few hours. She was afraid for Peeta, whose smile was always a beacon and was strong and warm. The thought of him turning cold, never smiling...She was afraid.

She even admitted to herself that she was afraid for Haymitch. He didn't stick around them a lot (ever), but he still was someone. And he was one of the only someone's she had left. So she felt afraid for him too.

She tried to run through the last things she said to people as the sun continued to threaten to overtake the horizon. Plain goodbyes to most. Haymitch got a roll of the eyes, Peeta got a "see you" and a rush out of the room.

No wonder she had nightmares of him dying all night. That couldn't be their goodbye, whether or not they_ did_ wake up from this. He was too good for that. She thought of the doctors he'd be surrounded by today. They'd prod and poke him and get him prepped for surgery. And then just like that, he'd be put under and his future would be in the hands of people who couldn't even tell anyone what his eyecolor was (_is, he's not dead yet. Is_.)

She looked around, and when everything seemed clear she tiptoed out of her room.

* * *

She didn't want to get out of bed. Getting out of bed meant to get ready, and getting ready meant the wig, the make up, the voice, everything. She wasn't really needed today though, so that was good. She could sleep in, and she would.

Only as she laid there, willing herself to fall back asleep, she couldn't. "Dammit," she muttered under her breath and stood up.

* * *

She ran. Will they let her through? Will she even get there, or will she get lost? She didn't know and didn't care. All she knew was that he was getting laid down upon a cold metal table and was going to be put under with a goddamn gas and she may never see him again. She didn't try to argue with herself, although she probably should have. _I already said thank you. _But it's not about that anymore._ We're in the middle of the Capitol's games. And he could die. He could die and I could die and maybe it'd be easier if we both died._ She ran faster.

Peeta seemed to continue to creep up on her, and she was still surprised about this. She didn't let herself take the time to realize just how much she cared until his name was called to be Reaped. She remembered that moment –it felt both a million years ago and just yesterday at once– the feeling of it all, and how she wished there was a way that maybe she could take his spot instead of him. That's not how it works, of course, but the thought helped. Because Peeta crept up, and in, and she cared. She hated that, she wanted to smack him for making her care about him, but it was too late for that, she was too far in. When you were called to be reaped, you were supposed to disengage from anyone and everyone. She only grew closer to Peeta, and again, he crept up on her and this building anxiety and inability to breathe wasn't due to the fact that she was running but due to the fact that she could be too late and she wouldn't find him awake.

"Miss, you aren't supposed to be here," A tired voice rang out to her. They must have just recognized her though, because the nurse started walking into the middle of the hallway to stop Katniss. "You need to go back to your room, Miss. You're donating today."

She'd laugh at the word donate if she could. But not today. Today and right now was not the time for that. "Please," She rasped, and Katniss was surprised by how her voice sounded. "Please. I just, I need to see Peeta. Before..." Her voice refused to finish the sentence, her mind cut off from what this before was that she needed to see him for.

The nurse looked her over, and slowly smiled. Katniss knew what was going through her mind as if she could read it. This woman watched the interviews, she knew of their "tragic love story."

"Alright," she whispered. "But just this once." _That may be all I get. _She gave Katniss a smile and turned to start walking down the hall, looking back at Katniss only once to give a 'come on' look. Katniss followed quickly, and her stomach felt like it was flipping. It reminded her of somersaults and cartwheels, things that Katniss long ago loved to do. A memory she didn't realize she had anymore. Her and Peeta were seven, and it was a day that he spent recess with her. He didn't believe her when she said she could do a cartwheel so she proved him wrong. He laughed, and she liked how it sounded, so she did cartwheel after cartwheel around the boy that was laying on his back and laughing. The world was dizzy, and she fell with her head on his stomach. Their laughter bubbled and spilled together.

She forced herself back into the present, back to chasing the nurse down a hall. It was an odd memory, and she didn't understand why she remembered it just then, but it was there and she did. The nurse stopped and jerked her head to the door on her right. Katniss' stomach did another somersault, a somersault in the sun with the laugh of a boy long ago, as she went over first to the large window that peered into the room to first see and make sure that he was still awake, that she would still see those eyes opened and alive and still whole. She held her breath, and there he was, awake and laying in the bed, looking nervous. But awake. He was still awake.

She didn't even notice the nurse anymore as she opened the door and quickly closed it behind her. With her back turned to him and her hand still on the handle, he called out to her. "Katniss?" There was hope and surprise in his voice, and he was wondering if maybe they somehow gave him the gas already and that he was dreaming this. She turned to face him, slowly, and then came to right up to the side of his bed. She risked a quick smile that didn't show her teeth. Her hand reached up without her mind telling it to, and she brushed back his hair from his forehead. "Hi Peeta."

"I haven't been put under yet, right? You're here, you're actually, really here?" He asked, hopeful and dreading the answer.

She sat on the bed near his torso, and he knew it had to be real because he could just feel the warmth of her skin for even daring to be so close to another's, to _his_. "I'm here."

His hand reached for hers – or did she reach for him? It didn't matter, not really – and their fingers intertwined and they both gripped hard and strong to each other. A single thought passed through the both of them at that point, as if their hands connected their minds as well: _This may be the last person I really see_. It was a scary, bleak thought, but Katniss thought that if she was to die, she was glad that she got to see Peeta one more time, that amongst the doctors, he'd be the last real thing she saw. Peeta was ready to die the moment he was selected, knowing it had to become. And Peeta, even back then, smiled at the possibility that he'd get to see her face before the medicines pumped deep within and took him away.

He decided, laying on what he was sure was his deathbed, that there were worse ways to die.

"Are you nervous?" She asked, her voice jittered. She wanted to slap herself for asking that, both of their nerves were obvious. She didn't let go of his hand.

"Nah, not at all." He chuckled. "Just another day in Peeta Mellark's life."

She forced smiled, despite the fact that she didn't want to. She was happy he could still joke (or try to at least), but the fact remained that in just a few minutes he'd be knocked unconscious and cut open. "Do you know what they're taking?" She brought her face closer and whispered.

She couldn't stop asking questions the moment they came to her mind without thinking about them and he couldn't stop his stupid jokes. It was either that or he would do something stupid like say again that he loved her and try to kiss her and never stop. "They didn't tell me. You think they'll have a bowl in here with papers on them? Effie can draw out the piece that says whatever they're taking. Maybe the odds will be ever in my favor." He faked a Capitol accent, and failed at it. The saying was an old one from the Capitol that they liked to string around still at times.

Katniss frowned and straightened up. Peeta regretted what he said immediately because it made her put distance between them again. She still held his hand though, and tightened her grip even as she moved away from him. "I don't see how you can be making a joke about this all." Her voice was still a whisper, but it sounded like it ripped through her. She looked away from him, but he couldn't help but notice the tear seeming to glisten in her eyes.

He sighed and reached up and brought her chin to look back down at him. He left his hand resting there for a second longer before he let it drop, he risked it. "Because if I don't I'll scream and cry the entire damn time."

Her body let go of a certain tension she didn't realize she was holding, and nodded. "Well, we'll just have to make it through this, alright? No giving up." Her eyes were fierce and he couldn't do anything else but nod and agree.

There was movement and talking outside the door, and Katniss felt herself beginning to panic. She turned to the door. _Peeta could soon be dead. I could soon be dead. They could kill us, and nothing could stop them._ She turned back to the boy in the bed, Peeta, his soft blond hair and his bright blue eyes. She saw some of the panic within her eyes reflected on his own, but he was trying to hide it. She tried to smile, she tried not to notice the smell of sterile air around her, she tried to focus only on Peeta because _Peeta, he has been the only thing that has kept me anchored to what was real since the train._ She gripped his hand tighter, and placed her other one on his shoulder.

She has no idea what she is doing. The thoughts of what he said in his interview last night came about, but she tried to push it out. _It was a lie, a lie to save us both, it was a strategy._ She practically yelled in her head, as if thoughts would listen more to angrier thoughts, but even amongst the nerves and tension and bleached out white, his smile was light and his eyes reached out to her.

So on top of all the nerves and facing the idea of her possible death, Katniss had jitters spreading through her and pooling in her stomach. It was his smile, and how it made her smile back, even if she wasn't a person to smile, and even if this was not a situation that was made for smiling.

There was a warmth that radiated from her hand on his shoulder and through him, a warmth that had nothing to do with the temperature of her skin. It seemed a steeped tea, and just as comforting. His hand that wasn't held by hers went up, and reached for her shoulder as well. "Katniss," he breathed, and the word, the name,_ her _name, grew between the both of them and she found herself leaning even closer to him.

Too close. It was too close, and he was touching her shoulder and she was touching his and it was too close. It was warm suddenly to her, warm like burnt loaves of bread on a rainy night of starvation. His hand moved from her shoulder to her neck, to her cheek, and his fingers danced up and down on the landscape of her face. She felt herself fall into the feeling, and she told herself to stop. _Stop, stop this, it's too close, you already care too much. _

A doctor barked an order outside, and she heard footsteps scurrying to assemble together. She gulped, hoping somehow that maybe by forcing more air into her lungs she could force more time between the two bodies on the bed.

She'd never stop lying to herself.

And the door opened to prove it such. She turned back to Peeta, her eyes were wild and their faces were so close their noses almost touched. She felt hysterical, _they're going to take me, force me out, and he's going to be put under_, but she somehow was able to keep her voice steady and strong. "If I were a person to give a kiss for good luck, I'd do it."

He was silent and still for a moment, and he wanted to ask aloud again like before if he was already put under. Instead he found a chuckle that brushed out of his lips, and his hand went back down to her neck, and he smiled at her before she could realize what he was doing. "Well it's a good thing I am." And he brought her head down, her lips to be on his.

He could have cursed himself for the amount of times he imagined this. Kissing Katniss. How could he even believe he could ever really imagine it, how could he even try? Her lips were bitten, and he didn't want to die just so that he'd get the chance to memorize each and every groove. And so he kissed her, and she kissed him back. As she kissed him, it was almost as if she could see the yellow of a dandelion from so long ago behind her closed eyes.

She never put much thought to a first kiss (never much thought of course, was none, never, at all). People at school seemed to teeter and bounce whenever lips found theirs, and once too many she overheard people gushing over it. Her scowl stayed, she'd walk away, she'd roll her eyes. Kisses couldn't feed her family, kisses couldn't make sure her sister's cheekbones didn't hollow out, kisses couldn't do anything but distract and mess everything up. Besides, she made a promise not to care for people, and although she also heard of those kisses that were mistakes that smelt of burning liquor, she knew that resolve of her would keep that out of her future.

If she was ever told that she would in fact, eventually, kiss someone (because she was afterall human, and humans have a need to kiss, and be kissed), and that her first kiss would be on a hospital bed in the Capitol, and the boy would be Peeta Mellark, well she didn't expect she'd be able to fill her lungs with enough air to laugh enough. The thought of it, removed from the actual action, _was_ laughable. Maybe that's why it happened, and had to. _Unfinished business_, she told herself, and all of Panem. She meant saying thank you after all these years, but as he pressed his lips more into hers, as he shifted her bottom lip in between his and pulled her closer, she thought maybe this, that Peeta Mellark himself, was her unfinished business.

And it was over soon, much too soon, because the doctors were in and they pulled Katniss away. "Let's go, darling. You have to leave now."

Her emotions were running too high. She wasn't used to it, she was used to them packed tightly within her, never poking through, but everything seemed to burst though her. _And he kissed me._ And it felt like something new. She looked at the doctors and nurses, and there was white coats and white hats but still the Capitol made its presence within the blues and greens and pinks of hair, and she turned back to Peeta. She kissed his forehead, and kissed his jaw, and kissed, kissed, kissed his cheek, his nose, and she went to kiss his mouth again, just once more maybe–

"Miss, you don't have anymore time."

A gritty awful truth.

They pulled her away and she looked at him. She refused to say goodbye, she couldn't. That was too final, and he was already looking too content. And he was. She kissed him, really kissed him, and he could die happy. But he couldn't. She wouldn't allow it. They kept pulling her and she fought them for a bit to come back to his side. She held his one hand in both of hers, and her eyes had a fire that blazed the grey into his blue. "You come back to me," her voice hard and strong. She let go of his hand, and let herself be dragged out without a fight anymore from the room.

Peeta let out a shaky breath as the doctors started to crowd around him. _Well, now I can't die_.

* * *

He brought her the strawberries that she loved in the morning. Plump, red, delicious, bloody strawberries. She knew what the day was, it was the day of Katniss' donation, but she couldn't say it aloud, and couldn't say it to him. So she thanked Gale for the strawberries, but instead of going inside, she took his hand and she walked to the meadow, one hand dragging him, the other holding onto the bag of strawberries.

"I have things to do, you know," he protested. He could easily snap his wrist and be rid of her grip on him, but he didn't. And she knew that. She knew well how easily he could fight her off. But she knew better how he never would.

"You're a liar, Gale Hawthorne. You made all your trades already. You made sure to do so before you brought me my strawberries," Her voice was light, and she pushed the thought of the day away. _Just get to the meadow, and be with him. You'll find out what you need to know soon enough_.

There weren't many times that Gale ever acted _not_ angry with Madge. Then again, there were not many times that Gale ever acted not angry, period. Words sometimes bit, hands sometimes clenched, but Madge understood, and even at times found herself doing the same. It seemed a laugh, Madge, always in pretty dresses with a pretty smile, capable of such anger, but she was. It festered in her like opened living blisters, and the feeling of Gale's anger too, Gale's anger which was so natural and lively, she was able to find a way to quiet it, even just for a bit.

The strawberries weren't bad either.

And he laughed when she pushed one into his mouth, the red smearing onto his face. And she laughed when he tackled her and forced the strawberry juices into her mouth. And he kissed her, and they both tasted like strawberries, and there was no hint of desperation and no hint that they kissed and touched and did all of this to make up for a dead girl lost to them. Amongst the meadow, with all the flowers, with him and the strawberries, it all almost felt normal.

When they got back to the houses, every television showed the tragic first kiss ('_and maybe last, oh how dreadfully suspenseful this all is_' a commentator added) of the two from District Twelve that were about to placed under a scalpel.

* * *

Doctors swarmed him and moved him from the bed to a cold slab of a table. They didn't say anything about the girl they just pulled out of the room. Didn't say anything about the kiss he and her shared, about the kisses she planted all over his face. They didn't say anything at all to the boy on the table, but instead spoke in even metallic tones about the incisions they'd start this all out with.

Peeta found a smile on his lips even as they ripped open his hospital gown to apply a salve and then hookups with wires. He felt his smile even when the mask came over his mouth. _You come back to me_. He tried to think of a time in his life when there was anything ever to come back to. Nothing. Just Katniss.

And he thought for the first time since this all, the first time he let himself allow it, that he truly wished he could make it out of this alive.

Not that it was up to him. Not that it was really even up to the doctors around him. It all depended on how the Capitol felt about him. If he made a good enough impression, that they wanted to fawn over him and have him around to become a star.

_That_ didn't matter to him. What mattered was the girl that was thrown out of his room just before. If he went through all of this to survive just for her to not, he'd throw himself onto the table again until they took enough from him that his heart stopped.

A gas started to pump through the mask, forcing it's way into his lungs, and his eyes started to feel heavy. He struggled to stay awake, wished the stupid mask wasn't over him. He wanted to bring his fingertips to his lips, where hers were just before. The gas was making reality within him struggle, and he wondered fleetingly, if it all really did happen? Did Katniss really come in here to visit, did she kiss him?

He shut his eyes tight, and the image of a girl with a red dress and two braids instead of one danced through his mind. She danced and danced and soon, she disappeared from his image. He wanted to cry out, but the color that took over was a grey, piercing and warm and cautious all at once, and he felt happy with this color, with this being the closest way to being able to look into her eyes during what could be his final moments.

No birds were singing as Peeta Mellark was pulled under. But if he listened hard enough, he could hear a voice of a girl singing a song from his District, and it sounded like home.

* * *

She expected a nurse to escort her back to her room. There was a flurry of doctors and nurses nearby Peeta's room then, him about to be put under. Katniss tried to not think of that, and refused to let herself look through the window that looked into his room where he was no being prepped. She couldn't look in. Would she be able to see them prepping the place upon him that they'd be reaping from? If they swabbed his chest, would she be able to throw herself in there and take it instead? No, it was better not seeing, better clearing the mind of what is to come. As Katniss walked down the hallway, she let her fingers trail across her lips fleetingly. _I'll take this with me, this will be my last memory of him before I go under_.

She walked as if she was already a ghost through the halls. She felt it too, and the only thing that brought her back was the soft sound of crying from a room to her left. She hesitated, looked in the window, and saw Rue. She tried to shake the out of worldly feeling she had, the kind one gets when they walk a walk that is certain to lead to death, and look at Rue. There was a nurse in her room, and she turned and went to leave Rue alone. Katniss looked at the nurse as she walked away, and the flash of blonde hair (blonde; not a Capitol green or blue or purple but _blonde, goddammit, blonde_) made her hold the wall for support as the world felt dizzy around her. _This is why I'm here_, she told herself fiercely._ I'm here to make Prim realize her chances she has at home, better than anyone else I know in District Twelve_._ She cannot give herself up to these people. Like I did._ Katniss shook her head and then opened up the door to visit one other person. She remembered earlier in the week, during lunch one time. Peeta and Rue were the only ones this whole time that she'd allow herself to acknowledge as real live beings. It made sense that she'd visit them both, even though this one was more impromptu. Still, it felt needed, and maybe almost more important.

When she looked at Rue, the tears in her eyes and the fear there too, she saw a little girl needing someone like a bigger sister to hold her and tell her it'd be alright. Katniss knew a girl like that, back in a life she used to have, the girl that Katniss would (and did) give up everything for. Rue smiled at Katniss, but the tears still fell.

"Hey Rue." Prim, the name Prim was on her tongue but she bit it back. She missed her so much, missed hugging her sister and holding her hand as they walked to school together. She missed tucking in the back of her shirt and calling her "little duck." But she didn't regret her decision, not ever._ If I didn't do this, I still would have lost her. Everyone would have lost her._ Katniss cleared her mind of Prim, and focused back on Rue.

The girl attempted a smile. "Hey Katniss."

Katniss grasped at her small hand. It was so small, so heartbreakingly small. She took a deep breath and smiled to be brave for her, for Rue. Whenever the Capitol got younger people from the District to be reaped, they always had small, non-lethal donations. She watched Rue's interview, she saw how the crowd reacted. They loved her, and it was easy to see why.

"I'm scared," she whispered finally, and squeezed Katniss' hand.

Her small hands, her small voice, everything of her was so small and fragile. Katniss wanted to take her away, call_ her_ Little Duck and tuck in _her_ shirt– no. No, no. She was in the Capitol, and there was no one here (thankfully, thankfully) to say and do this for. This was Rue, from District Eleven. So Katniss kept her composure, and was thankful her hand wasn't sweating. "I am too. We all are. But it'll be okay." Katniss almost scoffed at herself for that. It'll be okay. _No, it wouldn't._ But she could be dead today, and she'd never have to explain how it would never, in fact, be okay.

Rue nodded but the fear didn't leave her eyes. Her voice was still a squeak. "I miss my family."

Silence bowled over the two of them. Katniss stroked the girl's hair, and looked down at her. "I do too." Her smile was a grimace. "Do you know why I felt so connected to you, Rue? Because you remind me of my little sister. I saw, _see_, her spirit in you." She took a deep breath. _Stop that train of thought now._ "But it won't do any good to sit and dwell in memories and dreams. Remember your family, but you have to realize the severity of this situation. That your family will be safest if, if," Could she really say these words to Rue? Be the reason of the heartbreak of the crash of childhood innocence? She had to. "Your family will be safest if you don't seek out for them again. Okay?"

The little girl looked on the edge of tears, and Katniss felt the same way. She swooped down by the girl, and embraced her. "We're family, alright?" Katniss whispered as she drew circles in her back. Her mind cursed her, it was one thing to cling to the existence of Rue, but she was digging something deep. _What if I don't survive? I don't want her to hurt_. She pulled back from the little girl to see her face.

But Rue smiled, and the clouds of her mind subsided. "Family." And then she giggled, and Katniss could have laughed along too just at the sound. "Is Peeta part of our family too?"

Katniss smiled and went back to stroking her hair. "Yes, Peeta is. And when we're done with our first donation and recovery, we're going to add more to our family. All of the other Reaped. You'll meet them, they're great."

They were silent for a little while more. "Katniss, they're going to be back soon. Can you...can you sing for me?"

Katniss nodded after a bit. "Okay." She sang the song she held for Prim, a song about a meadow. _Here your dreams are sweet and tomorrow brings them true, Here is the place where I love you. _She kissed Rue's forehead, felt her heartbeat (_here is the place where I love you_) and turned away from her quick. Katniss felt tears in her eyes and didn't want the little girl to see them. She busied herself with fiddling with the vase of flowers that all of the reaped had on their sidetables, white roses that seemed to have an overpowering smell. She took a deep breath, and turned to her one last time before leaving the room. "I'll see you in a bit."

They smiled at each other, agreed, and Katniss stepped away.

* * *

The moment Katniss laid back down on her bed, it seemed like Doctors were all around her. Her mind was spinning, so much had happened in the past hour she wasn't sure if it really hadn't been a couple days.

She was born a fighter. As they laid her upon the sterile table and prepped her, she remembered that about herself. She remembered her mother telling her long ago, how she almost died within her. The umbilical chord was wrapped around Katniss' neck, and if she wasn't born within the next five minutes, she would have been lost. She came into the world fighting. With the possibility of death so near, she tried to coax herself to being a fighter to her last breath.

A doctor called out for gas, and Katniss felt herself panic. Her mind forgot all thoughts of being a fighter. She didn't want to go under. What if she didn't wake up? What were they going to take? They didn't even tell her. Her eyes moved to her bedside, to the vase of white roses that everyone was given. A card was there as well, the words "May the odds be ever in your favor" were written in a nice calligraphy. She almost vomited. _This wasn't a damn gambling game, this was my life_. This wasn't odds, this was a planned out decision.

Something was fit over her mouth, and she let out a panicked scream. Were they going to suffocate her with machines taking her last breath? Mines came to her mind, her father suffocated underneath it all. She didn't want it to be like this; she was sure these were her final moments and she'd live them as a coward. She would die as a coward. No, she'd die unconscious with doctors searching through her insides for something to use. She started to move to yank the mask off of her, but doctors restrained her limbs with straps. She stopped screaming. Strapped like an animal, screaming like a coward, and soon to be cut open as if just a bag of usable parts. Was there anything left in her that was a human, truly?

The gas started to pump and her eyelids felt heavy. The room started to fall away, and a dark blue shined through. _Dark, not light like Peeta's eyes. Peeta, who was already under. Peeta who kissed me._ That was human. She'd hold onto that, she had to. If she could move she'd go to touch her lips. The dark blue turned to black, and she fell under consciousness with almost a smile on.

Not that the doctors noticed.

* * *

The first to have their heart monitor ring out a flat tone was not a surprise. She was a woman named Mags who once upon a time came from District Four. She lived a full life really, and most of it was in the Capitol. (All of it? In her mind things that came before the Capitol's tall buildings and blinding lights faded away. She had to have Finnick describe the ocean to her some days, just to remember what it felt like to stand with the sand crinkling between her toes and to not feel so alone.) She lived longer than they expected, but she never really gave a problem. If anything, she was always a delight. Not a sensational tabloid hit, like some of the younger ones are. Not a complete joke, like some of the older and abusers of substances were. She was kind, and her smile brought her through every donation with an _aw, just let her be, just look at how absolutely kindhearted she was_. She had a smile that could show it. Or she did.

She always babbled and no one could ever understand what she said. Except Finnick, Finnick was able to understand her. She looked like an old, old woman, and maybe she was one. The donations they put her through made her appearance seem ancient, and no one could remember her age. Not even her. Did they mess with her head when she donated before? Probably. They had to. But it wasn't like there was someone that Finnick could ask. It wasn't like there was anything he could do except understand her babbles, hold her hand as he talked of the ocean, make sure to take company with high paying socialites to keep them, everyone, safe.

Mags on the table, and the machines started beeping. The doctors continued their work and got what they needed. Their movements never quickened, the doctors never went to try and help air get through her lungs. Then they turned off the machines, left the room turning off the lights, and never looked back at the still open body. The other nurses would come and prep her for the morgue. Their work was done.

* * *

A girl with hair scorched red like a sunrise was the first to wake up from the donation. She awoke alone with the doctors outside her room, to the beeping of a machine keeping her heart rate and a machine helping her breathe.

She wanted to curse herself for being alive. She was a smart girl, and she knew that the moment she was Reaped she was a dead one too. She accepted the fact, better than others who say they do but go through hoops in hopes of pleasing the Capitol and getting themselves more time to live. But that wasn't what she had in mind for herself. No, this was not to be her future. She'd take a death before she took life in the Capitol. She'd take death before she could screw something up and get her family or neighbors hurt. She was going to die, and she'd do it on her own terms if the Capitol wasn't going to do it for her. She'd let them know that they had the final say too.

Everything ached, but she forced her hands up to the contraption in her mouth. She ripped off the tubes, she scattered all the wires, and she laid there gasping, and let her eyes closed. The beeping picked up a fast pace, and it seemed her chest burned, but she felt a smile despite it all. She thought back to her interview, how Caesar said she resembled a fox and the Capitol all laughed. It was her turn to laugh, and she did. She resembled a fox, and she outfoxed them all.

By the time the doctors responded and got to her room, she was dead.

* * *

He whistled a song forbidden by his wife when she woke, rubbing her eyes to rid the sleep. He was in the kitchen, drinking a tea, getting ready for the day.

"Little Bird? What are you doing awake?" His voice even when just speaking sounded like a song. Katniss smiled at him, at her father, and chirped and she sprung into his lap. She was eleven, probably too old to go around jumping into a father's lap, but he laughed and held her still.

There was no mistaking their resemblance. The eyes, the skin, the hair, even her voice and her devilish playful smile, Katniss was truly her father's daughter.

"Daddy I want to sing with you," she whispered and he smiled. She loved his songs, especially the ones that her mother banned. Those always her favorites, the ones that she learned every word to.

"Okay, but just a bit because I have to go to work." Katniss nodded. "And quietly, so we don't wake up your mother and Prim, alright?"

He started the song and she joined, their words hushed and with the taste of morning upon them all, but still beautiful.

_Here it's safe, and here it's warm  
__Here the daisies guard you from every harm  
__Here your dreams are sweet and tomorrow brings them true  
__Here is the place where I love you_

Birds stopped to listen to the two of them sing, even this early and even with their voices a bit raspy from sleep. Her father twirled her after the song was over, and she suppressed a giggle.

"It's getting warm, Little Bird. This Saturday, take out your swimming trunks alright? We'll go to the lake."

Katniss nodded excitedly and he swooped down to give her a hug and a kiss on her forehead. Soon she'd wake up Prim and they'd get ready for school. Prim was still young, but she figured this was a good year to start teaching her to swim. Her father was a good teacher, and she'd make sure to help too.

The last time she was her father's or mother's little bird. The last time she sang. The last time her father was above ground.  
_Here is the place where I love you_.

* * *

Her mind swirled awake and crashed through her like a tornado. Her eyes opened, everything seeming to have a blur to it all. Her eyes couldn't focus, everything was moving. Katniss couldn't truly see anything.

Anything except for the white flowers, still waiting for her on her end table. She could make out the words on the card nearby, and they screamed out to her _may the odds be ever in your favor._

It seemed like there was weight upon her, was that the earth? Was she buried underneath it all? Maybe, in the rubble, she could find her father.

Beeping sounded, and she closed her eyes and fell back asleep.

* * *

"Do you have a sister, little girl?"

She looked at the older lady in front of her, a woman beyond her years and beyond the point of being able to remember little girls with a trade to do's family, and Prim's laugh was dying on her lips. _Dying like – _no, no, stop that thought. Prim had trades to do. The Hawthornes helped out a lot, basically adopting both her and her mother (_mother, she was more of a child than me at this point_). But still, she had Lady her goat and she still could do trades. She did many trades with Mr. Mellark, the baker, a kind man always to her, but sometimes it was too much. Mr. Mellark, his son was Reaped. His son was in love with Katniss. _Katniss. Katniss. Katniss._

No, she didn't think she'd ever really be able to step out of her big sister's shadow. She always had been so comfortable there, but ever since Katniss left it felt suffocating. It was too much to still have the shadow of her sister but not her actual sister around. She missed her, missed Katniss, so much that it hurt.

_Do you have a sister, little girl? _The old woman asked her, just to have a conversation as they traded in the Hob. And Prim had to think, _do I?_ She thought to the List that just started, the list of people that died during the Donations. No names from District Twelve were listed, not yet at least. Katniss was still alive. Her sister. Her _sister_.

But if Katniss died, they wouldn't be given her body. It'd stay in the Capitol, used until it couldn't be used anymore, every part of her that could be taken would be. There'd be a memorial with just photographs and memories, a funeral without a body, _just like father_. Was that a curse of the Everdeens? To die and not be able to be truly grieved for? She thought to her mother, already dead without a body to put in a casket, grieving but not grieved for, and wondered if there was anyway for herself to escape the curse.

If Katniss died, they wouldn't be given her body. But if Katniss lived, they wouldn't be given her body either. The only times that Prim would get to see her would be when she sat on the stage at least once a year, Effie calling out names of the Reaped. Was that a sister? Did Prim still have a sister, truly? _I'm an only child, in more ways than one._ She didn't have mother, or Katniss, and she thought angrily for just a second at how dare Katniss leave her alone. How dare she try and protect Prim by completely leaving her.

_Do you have a sister, little girl?_

And Prim smiled at the woman, handing her some goat cheese. "I do."

* * *

As the door shut behind him, his memory for some reason went to a couple of days ago when he talked to the Reaped. _Many of you will die_, he told them in a loud booming voice. True to his word, many already were dead. More would die within the following days. He remembered an involuntary surge of power that coursed through himself at that point, of how it felt to say those words that threw mortality in the face of people. Just bringing up their deaths made his heart beat louder, his blood sing through his veins.

He remembered wondering what it'd be like in their place.

He shook that from his head, and looked around the room. Peacekeepers escorted him down here by request of the President himself. He was confused at that. It was his time off, he wasn't even in his white coat but rather just a nice dress shirt and pants. He looked around the empty waiting room, wondering if maybe somewhere it was rather busy and he was needed even during his time off.

A nurse came towards him with a clipboard in her hands. "Mister Crane, yes?" She asked not looking up.

He looked at the nurse confused and scratched at his trimmed beard. _Mister? Not Doctor?_ And of course she knew who he was, everyone did. What the hell was going on? "Yes," He replied, a bit unsure.

She looked up at him and nodded. Not a flicker of recognition flashed through her eyes (she couldn't, couldn't, because if she did, he'd know, he'd find out, and she would lose her tongue). "Very well, come with me sir and we can prep you."

He followed her as she walked down the hallway. "Prep me? Miss, what's going on?" His mind flashed to all the Reaped, so low below him and so powerless.

Eventually she led him to a room and sat him down on the bed. "Change into this, please," She said of the hospital gown. "Now I know we don't usually tell the Reaped what they are going to donate, but the President gave me the okay to let you know your special part in all of this." He felt sick at the words and clutched the stupid gown closer to himself. Reaped? He remembered sitting high above them all, and wondering what it'd be like in their place. "We're going to need to take a little bit of brain matter from you today, Mister Crane. Please get in the hospital gown and situate yourself in the bed. The doctors will be around within the hour."

She nodded at him, fought the urge to tell him that she was sorry,_ sorry, I'm sorry this is happening to you_, and closed the door behind her. He knew it was locked, remembered how he himself would sometimes lock the door if a patient seemed to be particularly resistant. It took him a bit to realize his hands were shaking. _I'm going to die._ The message wasn't lost on him. The Reaped were never told what they donated, what the Capitol took from them. They only could guess from scars or pains.

But President Snow wanted him to know. He wanted Seneca Crane to know that he was just as powerless as the Reaped, that he was now Reaped, and that his brain made a wrong decision. And that his brain was Snow's, always Snow's, just like everything. And by changing things the night after the interviews, by listening to Panem, he signed his own death sentence.

He sat on the bed in the hospital gown and slouched. He remembered wondering how the Reaped felt when their mortality was shoved in his face. He didn't have to guess at that anymore.

* * *

Once upon a time, she would tell her little sister stories. Stories that her father told her, her mother even too. Of a land that was far, far away from District 12. A land entirely covered in the forest that was more of a home to Katniss than anything else. Stories about love and family.

Once upon a time, Katniss would cuddle closer into her father's figure, his body warm and the smell of smoke and ash upon him, as if he was still down in the mines, a part of them. His voice would come out, words would encompass her, and she'd feel herself cradled by them.

Once upon a time, she lost her father and mother in the same night. Her mother haunted her family as a ghost, her sobs filled the house and beat down upon her two daughters. Prim sat next to Katniss, and Katniss did not cry. She was still, held her sister, and made sure she would be a warm body for her little sister. "Once upon a time," she started, her sister instantly calming from just those words. "Once upon a time."

Once upon a time, Katniss was able to be there for her sister, and was the only thing that could be there for her. Once upon a time, Katniss never went further than the woods just outside her District. Once upon a time she didn't know how a boy named Peeta Mellark double knotted his shoelaces and was calm and gentle and stubborn all at once, that his eyes were a blue that surely had some kind of name all their own, that loved too much and too fiercely.

Once upon a time, Katniss was opened up by the Capitol, hooked up to machines, knives on her, within her. Once upon a time, Katniss almost died. Once upon a time, Katniss woke up.

* * *

The next time she woke up, her mind was able to keep up with it all. There was a dull ache all over her body, and when she peaked her eyes open, the lights seemed to blind her. Everything was white. The lights, the walls, the roses still on her endtable, the hair of the man that was sitting there looking at her.

She looked back at the man. She never saw him before in front of her, but she knew who he was. Everyone did. The President of Panem had visited her on her hospital bed.

"It's good to see you awake, Miss Everdeen."

Smells of the roses on her endtable came through, mixing with the rusted smell of blood as well. She looked down at her IV, trying not to pass out from the fact that she could smell her own blood, and how it mixed with those flowers. How much stronger it seemed right then than ever before. Katniss just nodded at the man, still a bit woozy from just waking up as well as not understanding what deemed her important enough for a visit from the President.

"I brought down some of the morphling so that you'd wake up. Me and you have a lot to talk about."

His voice was steel grating on concrete. In reality it was soft and gentle, but Katniss picked up on the undertones of, of, well she wasn't sure what, and it unnerved her. "Do you usually visit the Reaped after their donations, President?"

He let out a slight chuckle, amused by the blunt question. "Oh no, not usually. Only the special ones."

Her stomach turned. She had a feeling she wouldn't enjoy being special.

He continued. "And you are one of the special ones, Miss Everdeen. I have a favor to ask you though, before our chat goes any further. I must ask that you do not lie to me. In return, I won't lie to you as well. Can you agree to this?"

It was weird being asked this, Katniss thought, since lying to the President was treasonous and already against the rules. Rules didn't stop her from doing things before, from hunting and trading, but that was a long time ago, in a life that wasn't hers anymore. "We don't lie to each other," her words were unsteady. "Sure."

He smiled, and the smell of blood and roses hit her harder. "Excellent."

She noticed the door closed, how nurses and doctors walked past her room without even daring to look in and check. She knew it was because of the man that was sitting in here right now. His power seemed to seep through the entire place, and she just wanted him gone. "So, where to start?" And then he smiled at her, his eyes pierced hers. "I don't like you, Miss Everdeen."

"I don't like you either." She didn't mean to say it, but it was true. She hated this man. There was nothing that felt right about him, and she didn't give a damn if he was the President. She didn't like him.

He laughed at that. "I'm very happy to know you're taking our agreement of not lying to heart. Now that we've got that out of the way, at least we won't have to dance around each other with fake pleasantries." Katniss stayed quiet, allowing him to go on. "I don't like you. There was a chance I would like you, but Doctor Crane changed that. I would have liked you as a dead girl, Miss Everdeen." _The President wanted me dead, _Katniss thought to herself, everything suddenly cold. _And yet. Here I am?_ "Don't worry, I made sure that Doctor Crane was given, as they say, a taste of his own medicine." Katniss understood. The man was dead. And so marked the first person that Katniss realized was dead for her. "You've created quite a stir in Panem. Did you know that? You know a bit at least, your dear friend Mr. Odair was sure to tell you so." Everything he was saying seemed to have multiple meanings layered upon them. _I wanted you dead, but Doctor Crane made it so you'd live and now he's dead. I have heard your conversations with Finnick. You'd be better off dead. _The last one rang in her mind a lot.

"The citizens of the Capitol fell in love with your love story, and you seemed to have pulled at the heartstrings of them all. I'll be frank with you, that is your only saving grace. You were lined up for a donation that would have stopped your heart. But your strategy with that boy grabbed everyone, and now it's all they want." She opened her mouth to talk, to say what she didn't know, but to just say something. President Snow raised his hand up to stop her. "I don't care if it was strategy or if he really loves you. What I care about now is where we go from here. But before I get into that, I want you to realize what you've done.

"Most people aren't going to make it out of their first donation this year. If you think it's your fault, it's correct." Katniss was developing a body count during her sleep, apparently, and she wanted to vomit. "No one will mind. No one will notice." A name was threatening to spill out of Katniss' mouth, but it hurt. It hurt to think about, that name, in this conversation, and she needed to know but she didn't want to. Snow gleamed a snarl of a smile, and continued as if he knew where he mind went. "That little friend of yours. Rue." _Rue. _"She's dead. A tragedy, such a bright cute girl. We usually try and make sure that their first couple of donations are non-lifethreatening, give them a couple of years to charm the Capitol and then truly decide what to do with them. She was set with a simple donation as well. But it changed the night before, right after the interviews. Do you know why it was changed, Miss Everdeen?"

She knew. She was sure she was going to vomit, but she couldn't. She wished she could. She wished she could vomit upon this disgusting man in front of her. "You are what changed it. Doctor Crane made some changes, which included making your donation an easy one, and hers, hers was not so easy. Her donation was messy, if you wished to know."

She didn't want to know. She closed her eyes and all she saw was the little girl that was named Rue, she held her hand, and blood was all over the vision. "What did you take from me?" Katniss' voice was harsh.

"Oh, no no no, Miss Everdeen. We never share that information. We never delve into what you've donated. That is a question you cannot ask. You can ask however, who else died in place for you. Do you want to know?"

"No."

"Very well. You'll figure out eventually. We'll cut to the real reason I am here then. I have an offer for you. Well, several. And you have to make a choice. If you want, you can go home."

Her breath caught in her throat. Home. _Home_. Home to the soot and the ashes, but more, home to Prim. To the forests. _Too sweet of an offer from a man that hated me._ "What's the catch?"

Another chuckle from the man, but he continued on. "You can go home, or stay here. Your decision affects someone else though."

Katniss stilled again. "Peeta," her voice was a whisper, and it hurt as if ripped from her vocal chords. _Did that mean he was still alive? Please, oh please, don't tell me he's dead because of me too._

"Yes, your choice affects Mr. Mellark. Who I'm sure you're very worried about, yes?" Katniss just nodded. "He's alive." Relief. "As of right now." Panic. "And your decisions will decide very many things for that young man."

She didn't like this. She didn't like the fact that his life depended on her making good decisions, choosing right, because she felt like she messed up so much already. Peeta who saved her, Peeta who only gave her kindness, Peeta who kissed her. "Tell me." Her voice sounded stronger.

"Peeta had captured the eyes and hearts of many, before he went and confessed his love for you. He is very much sought after in the Capitol." Katniss felt her skin crawl and tried to keep herself from growling at this man. The President gave another little laugh. "So there are people that are calling for the story of the tragic lovers that were Reaped from District Twelve. Of the boy that was always in love with the girl and the girl with that unfinished business of hers. One of my offers is that you stay here in the Capitol, like all the others who were Reaped and survive do, and you stay in love with that boy."

Silence, and then he continued. "Or, like I said before, I'm willing to offer you a chance to go back to your home."

She knew there was more to it. Of course. She couldn't just 'go home.' "What would happen to Peeta?"

He shrugged. "Why would you care? You'd be back home."

She repeated her question. "What would happen to Peeta?"

His lips curled to a smile. "Well, we're not exactly sure. One of his machines could give out and he could pass away. The story of the tragic lovers from District 12 would die off as well, we'd give a story of how you died as well. Or maybe he'd survive, and become a good friend of Finnick's, and learn some of the trade that he deals with."

So there it was. Katniss could go home. All she had to do was trade Peeta's life, where he could die or be sold to the highest bidder in the Capitol. For a fleeting second she saw herself stepping off the train and running into the arms of her little sister. She hated herself more than anything at that moment. "No. I'm not doing that to him."

"No? You wouldn't make that tiny sacrifice to see your home and your family again? Your sister?"

"It's not worth it, _sir_. Thank you for the offer, but I'm staying." It's not a choice even. She couldn't do that. It hurt inside to think that there was in fact a way for her to get home to Prim, but she had to not think of it._ That's too much, I couldn't do that to Peeta. He doesn't deserve to be just thrown off to the side. I couldn't ever let that happen to him_. Not only that, but she was also certain that the President would have something else up his sleeve, and it wouldn't be as simple as he was saying it was.

"Delightful. And I do hope you realize how very much in love with this boy you are. You gave us quite a performance right before the donation, and I do hope we keep some of that up, yes?"

"What?" Her mind spun._ Performance?_

"Oh, didn't you realize? I thought you knew, since Mister Odair was so intent on letting you know how every room was bugged. We caught your secret little sneak off to see Mister Mellark before his donation."

Her hands were on her face. "That was on television? Every moment of our life will be on television?" She thought she was going to be sick.

"Yes, we caught that little rendezvous and played it, and may I say it was just absolutely sweet. I find it even sweeter that you didn't realize it was seen. Excellent. That makes this all that much easier, doesn't it? Be in love with the boy, be on camera, and the two of you will be able to find some private time some places, I'm sure." This time when he barked a laugh, Katniss wanted to scratch his face off. This was sick, her entire life was completely taken from her. _What did I expect though? Finnick warned me. Told me that the Capitol had me in their clutches tight already. _It was just the difference of guessing at that and the fact that the President was sitting here, telling her exactly how it was. "Oh, and be sure to love that boy fiercely. If the Capitol gets bored of you, well, I'm sure both of you would make for great workers in the business I have Mister Odair in."

He stood up, and fiddled with the IV bag. "Go back to sleep, Miss Everdeen. Just remember, this wasn't a dream. This was real."

Katniss was pulled out as the President turned his back on her. She didn't have dreams, or nightmares, or anything at all. Everything was just rather empty.

* * *

When she woke up again, everything hurt. Which didn't make sense to her at first, because she was so heavily medicated. She wasn't supposed to hurt. But she did.

She realized her chest was aching, and that it was her heart. It felt like it was tearing a hole inside of her and all she really wanted to do at that moment is just go home. Lay in her bed with Prim cuddled up next to her, go out hunting in the woods, and just be back to where she knew. She'd even hug her mother and kiss her cheek; Katniss found she missed her, even the shell of what she was. (She missed her wholly, missed who she was but she'd take the shade that she became, she'd take anything.)

She hated that Snow said that she could go home, even though that wasn't even really a choice. It made her mind selfishly at times think to being back home, to seeing her sister again._ I won't though, I cannot. _She had to stay, because Peeta has saved her life time and time again and this is the only way that she can try and save him.

He saved her time and time again, but did she deserve to be saved? She didn't feel it, she felt like a monster. _How many lives were taken just so that I could be put on display? How could Peeta even deal with pretending to love me, when all I am is a monster?_

She put her hand on her own heart, her own damn heart that still was beating fiercely inside of her. Reminding her she was still alive. Her hand felt clammy where it touched her chest, but she kept it there, and thought of Rue. Rue, who died amongst strangers that didn't try to save her. Rue, who died to give a stranger (_an undeserving one_, her mind adds) more life. Rue, who lost her life because it wasn't in the interest of the Capitol to lose Katniss. And she wouldn't get a funeral. She wouldn't get a grave or a ceramony. On television, those who died would be listed. Her family would just hear her name once more, amongst a list of other bodies that lost their life, and that was it. Katniss couldn't even give her flowers, or bury her, or do anything but live because she was too fucking precious, as deemed by the Capitol. Her hand clutched the skin that separated it from her heart harder. _Here is the place where I love you_.

* * *

"You have to do everything the Capitol says, sweetheart. If they ask a question, it's not a damn question. It's an order, a demand." He took a swig of the bottle in his hand. "You are their property. They say jump and you ask how high. They say kiss and you say how long. They say stay, and you don't leave, you don't consider leaving, until they say to move. If you do, everything will be taken from you."

"Everything already has been taken from me, Haymitch. My family is still back in District Twelve, while I'm here in the Captiol. I'm already alone, and everything already is taken from me. This threat on me makes it even more." Katniss sunk her head down into the pillows. She wished that she could be just slightly more horrible and selfish and said yes to Snow's offer to going back to District Twelve. _I can't do that to Peeta though._ But she didn't even ask him about what he thinks about the deal. What would he think? He'd have to be okay with it, regardless. The only other options besides the one she picked was death or prostitution. Yes, this was the better choice. She almost brought her hand up to her lips again, almost brushed against them like his own lips did before his donation. _How would he feel, having to be in love with me?_ When it came to Peeta she was confused, so she tried to clear her mind from that.

"You think those threats are just on your head, sweetheart? Do you not realize that just because they're not around your family is still in danger? You may have already lost them, may never see them again besides being able to look at them when you're on that damn stage once a year, but won't it be a relief seeing their face once a year? You act out, and suddenly their smiles aren't there to find you from the crowd. Snow will destroy them. Kill them maybe, or worse." He drank more, seeming to need it from his words and the thoughts they created.

Katniss sat in a stunned silence and wanted to curse herself._ I did this to protect them, to protect Prim_. There'd be no true way to protect her though, would there? _Maybe if we lived in a different kind of land with different kinds of rules._.. But that was a dangerous train of thought, a train that lead to bombs and blood, so Katniss stopped and thought of Haymitch's words. And how his face was scrunched up more than usual from the burn of the alcohol he was drinking. Her voice was broke a bit when she spoke again. "What'd they do to you?"

"Killed my family. Took my girl." Drank, drank, drank. "I was too arrogant and my thoughts were too free. Everyone learns the hard way, to pay for whatever actions were deemed wrong by the Capitol. Everyone gets chained down. I'm telling you all this so that maybe you have a chance to lose less. But you _will _lose something, someone. I just hope it's not everyone, sweetheart."

Silence. He drank more. She understood that then, understood at least the beginnings of it. Drinking made the brain woozy, drinking could make you forget what you lost. Drinking could make all the faces that Haymitch had seen come from District 12 and die on the table during their first donation. He acted like he didn't even care about her or Peeta, as if he barely took in their names, but she realized how much he really cared when she woke up. She wondered if he felt better or worse that they had to live with this fate. "How do they let you off with being a drunk?"

He laughed mirthlessly. Another sip. "I'm the sideshow act, the drunken fool." Another sip. "There are times when the Reaped aren't interesting, where they can't find an angle to show. I know because all of the sudden I have these invites to the bar for complimentary drinks. I get featured with my antics. One time they got me running around the building in just my boxers and my tie." He laughed again, only there was a bit of a real amusement in it, and Katniss even flickered a smile. "A long time ago, though. When it was a better sight to see good ol' Haymitch in just boxers and a tie. I don't think the Capitol would want to feature that now."

Katniss was silent for a bit, and played with her hospital sheet in between her fingers. "Did you get any invitations to the bar this year?" Her voice was quiet.

He looked at her, and saw he pointedly didn't take another drink. "No, sweetheart. Not this year." His voice was quiet too. She nodded, and understood. Maybe she could say a joke, say sorry that there wasn't any free drinks this year. Not that it mattered. There were stories about how much money was waiting for them in their houses in the Capitol. Money would never be a problem. Still, it'd be a good joke. But she couldn't say it, and they both understood.

Peeta gave them a show. And now she had to deliver. No need for a sideshow when you had a full segment.

* * *

Katniss got another visitor.

She didn't mean to be disappointed when she saw who it was, or rather who it wasn't, but really there was only one person she wanted – needed – to see right then. To slap, for being so stupid and saying what he did. To talk to, because there was too much that had come about since they were put under the gas. To just feel the presence of, because still Katniss felt uneasy around everyone except for him, could only recognize reality when he was able to exist amongst the atrocious joke that the Capitol was.

To kiss, because she was starting to forget the feeling of his lips pressed upon hers.

She cleared her mind of that. _No_. There were to be no kisses because she wanted to, but because they were told to be lovers for the Capitol. It wasn't about want. It wasn't about anything but doing whatever Snow and the citizens of the Capitol, _their wonderful audience_, wanted them to do.

She dreaded the feel of his lips, whenever she'd have to feel them again.

Finnick closed the door behind him and looked around a bit before sitting down. Katniss watched him, watched how his hands shook and how there was a slight twitch. Underneath his eyes were deep and dark and purple, his face bloodless. Something happened. "What's wrong?"

"Annie," His voice broke out, broke like a wave in the ocean, broke like his fucking soul, and Katniss felt her stomach drop.

_Oh no._ She remembered telling him that she'd be fine. "Finnick–" Her voice broke as well, but it wasn't like a wave, but more like the sound of a breaking bone.

"She's fine," He rushed to tell her, his eyes seeming to find Katniss and then look off elsewhere. "Well. She's alive."

Katniss would have felt better about that, but she was learning more and more that alive didn't always mean something better than dead. She stayed silent as she waited for him to continue. "She's not in pain, she's, she's awake. But she's," he paused, and looked at Katniss. As if it was too much at that point (and it was), he just looked down at his hands clasped with white knuckles in his lap. "She's different."

_Different?_ "Finnick what do you mean 'different?'"

He shook his head, his hands and fingers moving, twisting with one another. He wanted a piece of rope to knot and unknot easily so he could wish that he could unknot his own life, the tie that the Capitol has upon him, just as easily. "I don't know." Paused. "I overheard one of the doctors say that she's mad."

Katniss gulped, that word not sitting right with her. Annie Cresta? Mad? She didn't know this girl well (at all), but what she saw of her was a bright happy girl. Loved and in love with Finnick Odair. Nothing about her seemed mad. What the hell happened? "You've seen her?" Her voice was still.

Finnick nodded, still not looking up. "Yeah. I visited her. I was fine you know, my donations aren't ever big..." Katniss shook a shudder away from herself. To someone else this would sound like something good. _Not a big donation._ Katniss knew it was nothing to be thankful for. That Finnick had to at random moments any time during the day donate his own self, his body, to the citizens of the Capitol. "I walked in one time and I saw her just sitting there staring off with a faraway look on her face. And she just, she looked at me and started crying." He ran his hands through his hair back and forth. "I thought she was just overwhelmed. Or maybe that she heard about Mags." Finnick's voice broke a bit at the name of Mags, and Katniss felt if she'd start crying herself. _Mags. Another._ The thought felt almost automatic now whenever she heard the name of someone else, to try and think of them as dead. Nowadays, she was usually right.

"I didn't care that there were doctors around, or cameras. I went over to her, held her in my arms and kissed her forehead. She tried to push me away at first, but after a bit was able to calm down and just sit in my arms. Eventually I realized that she was talking. Er, mumbling." He sat with his head down, his head in his hands, and he just looked absolutely defeated. He felt that way. "I listened to what she was saying, but it wasn't anything really. She was singing songs from back home, from District Four. Lullabies, wedding songs, schoolyard rhymes. I eventually took her face in my hands and repeated her name over and over, made her look at me. She smiled and told me, 'your eyes look like sea foam.'" He stood up and turned away from Katniss. "After that, she just shut off. Her eyes became vacant and the life in everything of her turned off. But she was still awake. She sat up straight, I didn't have to hold her. But she just looked off, staring, and my voice couldn't reach her again."

Katniss thought painfully of her mother, of the woman who would look without looking, who was already dead before death. She had her moments, where a patient would come in needing help and she'd get to work. Sometimes Prim would curl up in her lap, and their mother's hand would go to stroke her hair. Her mother never came back for Katniss herself, and she used to take it personally, but she knew that there was not enough room in her heart for her mother after she abandoned her and her sister. There'd always be a wall between the two of them, she would never be the one to bring her mother out of her head. But there were times when she was. She needed to focus on that now, now with Finnick. "What else did the doctors say?" She asked quietly. She knew he just needed to talk, and not being one that ever was good with comforting words, she was happy about that.

Sitting down again, he shrugged. "I overheard the doctors say she's mad. They told me that there were a couple of times that the Reaped reacted like this to their first donation. That in a couple of days she'd start therapy sessions, and that if I wanted to, as a friend, I could bring her to them." The word friend was wrong, of course, they both knew that, but Katniss knew that he wanted to keep it secret before, and apparently still did. She thought it a bit foolish, the Capitol was already trying to tear them apart whether or not they realized. And they probably realized, she thought in the back of her head. They probably knew, and they were probably listening in to this conversation right now. She wondered if her paranoia was valid, if one day she'd snap from the thought of something always listening, always watching, always knew.

"Well you just have to help bring her back, Finnick."

He looked at her and then off, far away, maybe back to wherever home was to him, and nodded. "The sea always comes back to the shore. She will come back, too."

When he left her room, Katniss tasted salt. It wasn't until later she realized that she was crying.

* * *

She stared at herself for a long while in the mirror as she brushed her hair. It shone with a glow that didn't seem possible not in the sunlight, but maybe that's why her sister referred to her as sunshine. Prim herself, her own sunshine. Her sister. Katniss.

_Katniss._

It's been a couple days since Donation, and her name still hasn't been called out on the television with the dead. Electricity came and went in District 12, but the Capitol made sure to surge it through when they needed to add to the List. Her sister was still alive. Prim took a deep breath.

Prim's hands went up to her hair to braid, but she stopped them. Without her sister's help they came out messy. She didn't have the patience or skill to make them look good. She liked her braids because of Katniss. Katniss always wore her hair in one braid, and always put Prim's hair in two braids. Prim quickly went and tried one braid in her hair,_ like Katniss', not like the braids that Katniss does for me but just like hers_. When she finished and looked back in the mirror, she quickly tore it out. It was wrong, it was all wrong because it was _blonde_. That wasn't Katniss.

_Katniss isn't here. You're not a little duck anymore. You're not a little sister._

She wanted to slap herself for thinking that. Katniss was gone in the Capitol, but she was still her little sister. Prim would always be her little sister. Even if they're about to read her name on the List of the deceased, she was her little sister. _Things were just... different._

Things were different. Prim looked into the mirror again and nodded, not bothering with a braid. Things were different. She would wear her hair down. It hung around her like a curtain, and she wished that it was a magician's, where they could pull it in front of her and she could disappear.

That was foolish though. And Prim was not one to believe in magic.

* * *

Doctors came and asked for Katniss to accompany them.

Haymitch wanted to object but instead he bit his tongue for the want of a drink as he watched them put her in a wheelchair. _She's still so weak, too weak, why are you taking her?_ He never was a mentor really, never let himself care for any of the reaped, but he didn't do such a good job about that this time. And _she _survived, and _he_ did too. (So far, he was still alive, so far, but that was so fragile, wasn't that what was said? Too fragile.) But now he cared, the only two goddamn things he cared about besides the flask.

(The only things he'd let himself care about. There was more to care about, more in front of him to care about, but he couldn't. That was from a life long ago in the soot of a place called home. He couldn't care about those things, those people, any of that. But he could care about these two, and he had to. Someone had to.)

Katniss didn't know where they were taking her. Still a bit woozy from morphling drips, she let them push her down the hallway in the wheelchair without complaint. _Maybe they're taking me to see Peeta_, she thought foolishly. She didn't even believe it, but it felt good to think that they would. It felt good to think that she'd be brought to a room where he was, where his blue blue eyes were opened and fixed upon her. Maybe he'd open his arms to hug her, and maybe she'd hug him back, maybe she'd mess up his already messed up hair and he'd try to take down her braid and maybe, just maybe she'd feel his lips upon hers. She smiled at that, at the joke in all that, but didn't laugh aloud. Peeta saved them with the lie that he had built up (she still lied about the fact that it was a lie for him, she still couldn't accept it, not after everything she was told she had to do, not after she realized just what she had done and what a monster she was), and the two of them would now have to create a foundation upon it. No, she didn't want to kiss him, didn't want to because now she _had_ to. Or maybe she just didn't want to. Her mind felt woozy, and she blamed the morphling.

A door swung open when the two doctors pushed her through it, and she saw the word "Morgue."

Katniss started to fidget and talk then. She babbled, not knowing how to word what she was thinking (she didn't know how to think at this point either, she was dizzy, everything seemed blurry). _No,_ she said as she moved to the left in the wheelchair. They kept pushing her down the hallway. _No, I don't want to be here I can't, You have it wrong I'm still alive I don't belong here, No._

They told her to be quiet and stay still or she'd have every reason to be there, and she listened. Her heart was loud in her chest, trying to remind the men in white near her that it was still beating. They came to a window and stopped the wheelchair in front of it, putting the locks on the wheels. "President Snow wished for you to see the bodies of the others from the reaping this year, that didn't make it." It wasn't said, but Katniss understood. To reinforce his offer and deal, and all of the consequences._ Look at the dead, look at those that were lost. Look at what could happen to you and everyone around you if you don't do everything I tell you to do._

Katniss' head drooped and she felt dizzy.

"You have to look and see," The doctor on the right said, his voice was clipped and methodical. "The one right in front of you died from blood loss." His hair was blond but it was short (no curls, not needing a haircut, not blond enough, and she hated herself for the sigh of relief she let escape her lips for all of that). "He could have been saved probably, but he wasn't. The Reaped don't get saved." Katniss tried to look away but the one on the left held her face straight ahead. Maybe she could have closed her eyes, but she didn't feel like she could. She felt dizzy and the world was blurry except for the dead body in front of her that was just behind a glass. Her eyes stared at him, and the doctor continued. "He will not be buried, just like the rest who died from their reaping. His name will be listed tonight, for his family to know that he is dead. The rest of his organs that can be used right now will be taken and used. His body will be preserved, so as to be used up as needed by the Capitol."

The other doctor cut in. "He has rather good cheekbones, don't you think? I bet those will be used soon, someone will be after them the moment they make it in the Catalogue."

Katniss tried to not hear the words but they strummed through her like a taut string. She wondered of this boy's family back home, and if they'd have a memorial service for him. She wondered of this boy and the life he had before his name was called. She wondered if he had any families, anybody back at home that he kissed, any nightmares that made him want to still be tucked in at night.

She wondered of this boy, and how she finally recognized him as a human being as he lied atop a metal table, as cold as the surface, when just a couple days ago he was mere feet from her and she only allowed herself to think of him as a corpse.

(They were all corpses then, that's all she allowed to herself to think of about them, and now, seeing them with blue lips and still opened from the donation that killed them, seeing them in death, they were people. To know a person's death when you didn't know their life brought a sick sense of humanity to it all, and Katniss felt dizzy, and she knew it wasn't just the morphling now.)

The next dead body had a sheet pulled up to his chest. She was confused, the other one he was fully exposed and naked and _dead_, but the Doctors informed her. "The first donation usually is organs, but not always. Him, he had good legs. He got an admirer for them. Now the admirer got a new pair of nice legs, eh?" A laugh was barked.

* * *

It's a sick sort of guilt, to live when others don't. They are dead, cold and dead and gone, their eyes closed and to never open again. They are dead. You aren't.

Katniss thought of all the dead, saw them all in front of her, and how she was alive, and almost feeling well amongst it all. There's a sick sort of guilt that filled her through the knowledge of surviving the first donation when most didn't. An automatic thought, one that you cannot stop, makes it's way through. A thought that can't help but come up as you reflect upon a pale body with rigor mortis setting in._ I'm glad I'm not amongst the dead.  
_She was glad was not amongst the dead.

Her eyes automatically moved to the small and frail dead body of Rue, and she wanted to vomit. She wasn't dead, yes, but Rue was. And Rue was because of _her_. And still her automatic thought came to her,_ I'm glad I'm not dead_, and she pushed it away. She'd take a thousand deaths if to have Rue be alive. She'd donate every piece of herself if somehow this girl could open her eyes again and smile that blazing smile. The doctors turned her away, and Katniss tried to force away the image of the very still Rue from behind her eyelids.

Snow, she could tell, hated her. Wanted nothing more but her dead (he even told her, but he didn't have to – his hate for her hung on him like the smell of roses and blood). And yet here Katniss was, alive and doing better than most after their first donation. The only reason she was alive was because the precious citizens of the Capitol loved her. Because Doctor Seneca Crane realized it, and changed donations around to make sure she had one that would easily be lived through.

_He's dead for me too_, Katniss thought to herself lightly. She didn't think anything really of the man Doctor Crane. He was a man that made a living deciding the fate of people he didn't see as people and swapping their organs into 'more deserving' Capitol peoples. She didn't think anything of the man, but he was still dead because of her.

She wondered if his organs were Reaped.

As they continued to roll her down the hallway, Katniss suddenly hated Peeta fiercely. _It'd be better if he was dead,_ she thought to herself with a bite. Afterall, Rue may have taken her spot at donation, but it was Peeta's words that created the Katniss (or rather, the idea of Katniss) that the Capitol loved. _No, I hope he's alive. So that I can smack him. _Besides, he had to live through this. If he didn't, she would've agreed to a life in the Capitol for nothing. No, he had to be alive, and she had to be in love with him, although all she wanted to do was rake her nails down his face for making Panem like her more than the little girl that was now dead on her behalf.

He got the two of them in quite a mess of a thing, didn't he? She wanted to scoff, but didn't trust allowing any of her true thoughts be heard aloud by the doctors nearby. He got them into a messy messy lie, but she'd play along. She'd try and find a way out, maybe a way for them to get away. Eventually. Hopefully.

A life flashed by her quick, a life of her growing up in the Capitol, with Peeta always there, and she wanted to throw herself out of the goddamn wheelchair.

She never gave her future much thought, but this was never something that was in her mind. Even when she volunteered, when she gave up her life to the Capitol (gave it to them more than they already even had), she expected a short rest of her life. Maybe she'd be able to survive the first donation, but she didn't count on it. That didn't matter. Maybe she'd befriend a couple of the others. Maybe she'd pick up the flask like Haymitch and run her liver to unusable, or dredge her veins with enough morphling that she wouldn't even notice when they took parts from her. Shitty prospects, and truth is, what she was dealt was better than those other possibilities, but the truth of the matter is that she didn't have a goddamn choice.

She didn't hate Peeta, no, but she told herself she did. It was easier that way. He made it so she didn't have a choice (that was a lie, she always lied; he gave her a life, the Capitol took away her choice and always did – always would), and she wanted to hate him for that. She couldn't, couldn't ever hate him though, she knew that. That made her only angrier. He was so intertwined in her life, in the most looked-over ways. Sharing lunches as children. Giving her help (she didn't ask for it, wouldn't, not even at that age) with two cookies and loaves of bread. Being one of the only reminders of reality for the past week or so. And he was still alive. And he really was all she had left.

He was still alive. She knew it, and not just because Snow gave his word that he still was. She could sense it, somehow, that he was still alive. He was intertwined to her, and she wanted to rip at the roots he planted within her but she couldn't. It was too late. Besides, she had to be in love with him.

So she couldn't hate him. After everything, she could never find it ever to hate him. But what she could do though, was not ever really love him.

_That will be simple,_ she thought to herself with a scowl as she was deposited back in her bed. She hadn't ever had a problem in the past with not loving someone, the only person she allowed past that rule was Prim and Prim was gone, far away. _And safe,_ she assured herself, as she felt the doctors hook her back up to the IV and start the morphling drip.

Her eyes started to shut, and she felt her scowl melt to a soft smile at the decision. _Yes. Peeta Mellark, I will never love you._

* * *

She was fine after a couple of days to be released from the Hospital. She was well (_too well_, she thinks to herself with a sick feeling in her stomach), and she was told that she would be allowed to go to her house in the Village just at the edge of the Capitol that was specified for the Reaped who survived. She didn't leave though, not yet, because Peeta still didn't wake up.

And she couldn't think of going onto that street alone, into a lonely empty cold house. She heard the stories and knew it was big, and after all her years of her, her mother, and her sister cramped into a small home in the Seam, a home together, the thought of a going alone to it didn't sit well with her. She told her doctors that she'd wait for Peeta, if they could please allow her to stay in the Hospital please. They smiled, gave her a look because young love was just absolutely darling, and gave her a room a couple doors down from Peeta's.

Haymitch was around more often than not, and although he usually pissed her off, Katniss knew he was worried about her and Peeta both, was there _for_ her. He wasn't used to it obviously, randomly disappearing and coming back reeking of alcohol, but he was trying. It had been a long time since someone older tried to be there for Katniss, to allow Katniss feel protected and even her age, and although it was unfamiliar roles for the two of them, it became a comfort.

"Where's Effie?" Katniss asked, the two of them sitting in the room. Katniss was picking at her fingernails, not knowing ever what to do with her days and Haymitch had a pack of cards on him, playing some game or another by himself.

"Fuck if I know," his voice was a growl and final, telling Katniss not to ask him anymore.

She sighed, and felt the need to do something. "I'll be back," she said getting up, and Haymitch waved her off. She made her way down the hallway slowly, happy that they allowed her wear actual clothes rather than just the hospital gowns after she was deemed okay but still stuck around. She walked past his room, not looking through the window, not going to go inside, and just walked past with her head down. She walked a little ways down the hallway and took a deep breath, turned around, and repeated her actions in the other direction. Eventually she found herself in front of the window, looking at her feet, until finally looking up and through the window at the boy in the room alone in bed. He was still asleep.

He was always asleep.

Snow said that he was alive for now, and Katniss was afraid that there was a possibility that he wouldn't ever wake up. That wasn't an allowed thought though, and she pushed it out of her mind. He had to wake up. He had to wake up so they could leave this place, live in those stupid designated houses for the Reaped, and then figure out what to do. They were thrown together into this maze of the Capitol, and as much as Katniss was one to work alone and want to, she needed him and knew it. It was weird, needing someone, needing someone besides herself after all of the years of the one being needed, and it didn't sit well within Katniss. But it was true, she needed him. And she needed to be in love with him. She sighed. _Besides,_ her mind thought wryly before she could stop herself_, I gave up the idea of going back home, for him. _

He had to wake up.

She found her hand on the door, opening it, letting herself in and closing it behind her, before she even realized it. She hadn't visited him since the donation. She'd look through the window sometimes, see that he was still sleeping, but could never let herself in. She realized why as she did. It felt like too much, standing there with her hand on the doorknob, her back to him. She paused for a moment, waiting for his voice to call out to her and say her name. He didn't, there was only stifled antibacterial air and the beeping of machines that he was hooked up to. She took a breath, and turned to Peeta. Walking over to him, she took in his appearance. He was asleep, and seemed rather young. Even in the off glint of the Capitol's blaring white hospital, he seemed peaceful and very much just him. Just, Peeta. Katniss let out a breath that she didn't realize she was holding and brought a chair over to the side of his bed.

It was weird at first for Katniss. Sitting near the bed of an unconscious person. But it wasn't just that. She was sitting there next to Peeta, Peeta who saved her life. Even if she hated that, would have rather died, she couldn't deny that. She was alive in the end, after all this, her physical condition better off than others. She owed him that. She resented him a bit for that foolishly, and knew even more foolishly that there would probably be a part of herself that always resented him for having her survive. She volunteered and didn't know what she was getting herself into. And after it all, really, it would have been just so much easier to not wake up.

But she did. And she was waiting for him to wake up now.

Her hand tentatively found his, and was surprised that despite him being unconscious and wrapped in the Capitol medicines and machines, was still warm. She held his hand, her own calloused and scarred from hunting while his was a mixture of both soft and scarred from baking. It was a new kind of feeling and thing for her, but she was relieved to find that she didn't hate it. Maybe she liked it even a little bit; liked feeling that shot up her arm and through her for a millisecond at that contact of his hand. That was a relief. It'd be rather hard to pretend to be in love with the boy if even just holding his hand – while he was unconscious – was uncomfortable.

"You're going to have to wake up soon, Peeta." She whispered after a bit, feeling weird talking to a boy asleep but it felt more weird with just silence between them. "You have to, because I can't do this alone. Snow isn't too happy with me, and we have some things we have to do now apparently. But it'll be fine. You just need to wake up."

She was quiet then for a couple of more minutes, and then stood up. When she looked down at him, leaning a bit, her mind went back to when she was last in his room. When she was leaning over him, him in his bed as well, his hand on her shoulder and hers on his, and then their lips on one another. Her fingers found their way to her lips without her meaning to do so but brought them back down quickly. She shook her head, and then bent down closer to his face, until finally laying a quick kiss on his forehead. She repeated her words, but this time they were whispered, almost unable to be heard underneath all of the beeping. "You come back to me."

* * *

Someone was waiting for her when she left the room. She felt an anger in her when she saw him, the white rose in his jacket pocket as fresh as ever. "Ah, Miss Everdeen. And how is young Mister Mellark in there?"

Her body stiffened. "He hasn't woken up yet."

"Yes, yes. Well I gather that he will soon. Let us hope at least." He motioned to the hallway, for her to follow him in step, and she could do nothing but comply. "I must also thank you for stepping up to the plate with that visit you just had. The citizens have been aching for anything about those tragic lovers, and I'm sure they won't be disappointed with your display of affection and concern you showed for the boy back in there."

Katniss had to put all of her concentration upon not physically shaking as she walked side by side with the man. She forgot about the cameras, forgot about her obligations and the kind of life that this man was building for her as he damn well pleased. She wanted to trash the cameras back in Peeta's room, trash all of them. She wanted her own damn life that wouldn't be constantly watched over, the good parts broadcasted for the entire world as entertainment. She wanted to never hold Peeta's hand, never say any of the words, never do any of that. She should have stayed out of the room, waited for him to finally awake. She just stared straight ahead and gave a sharp small nod. "I forgot about the cameras," she murmured.

He let out an easy laugh, as if this was a laughable conversation. _It is,_ she thought, _for him. _"How absolutely endearing." Her room's door was just there, and he opened it for her. "I look forward to when we can get both you and Mister Mellark out of this hospital and the two of you can really begin your life."

* * *

"What do I do now, Haymitch?"

Katniss was nervous. Even a twinge of fear, one that felt more real than when she was put on the table to be operated on. She was afraid then, but that was foolish. This was the time to fear. When you made it through, and had to keep on living. Death would have meant everything was over. Why was she afraid of that? This, making it through, living, that was nerve-wracking.

Haymitch came to her side then, put a steady hand on her shoulder. There was no trace of alcohol on him, and she realized that he was sober. "You stay alive, sweetheart."


	2. sequel starting up

the sequel to this story has started up! can be found under "and it lives in my bones"


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